BREAKING: Supreme Court Rules Fed Must Release All Bailout Data
Update: SCOTUS ruled on March 21 - yesterday was the 5th business day.
--
Video - The Fed has 5 days to release all data.
March 21 (Bloomberg) -- The Federal Reserve must disclose details of emergency loans it made to banks in 2008, after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected an industry appeal that aimed to shield the records from public view. The justices today left intact a court order that gives the Fed five days to release the records, sought by Bloomberg.
A huge win for transparency.
Statement from Matthew Winkler, editor in chief of Bloomberg News:
As a financial crisis developed in 2007, "The Federal Reserve forgot that it is the central bank for the people of the United States and not a private academy where decisions of great importance may be withheld from public scrutiny. The Fed must be accountable to Congress, especially in disclosing what it does with the people’s money."
“The board will fully comply with the court’s decision and is preparing to make the information available,” said David Skidmore, a spokesman for the Fed.
The order marks the first time a court has forced the Fed to reveal the names of banks that borrowed from its oldest lending program, the 98-year-old discount window. The disclosures, together with details of six bailout programs released by the central bank in December under a congressional mandate, would give taxpayers insight into the Fed’s unprecedented $3.5 trillion effort to stem the 2008 financial panic.
“I can’t recall that the Fed was ever sued and forced to release information” in its 98-year history, said Allan H. Meltzer, the author of three books on the U.S central bank and a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
Continue reading at Bloomberg...
Mar 29, 2011 at 1:55 PM
Reader Comments (23)
As Don Corleone said: "I want to know what he's got under his fingernails..."
RIP, Mark.
lucifer--SCOTUS merely denied cert, which leaves in place the disclosure order from the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals (and large parts of the district court's order. As for shredding, harder to do with electronic data--especially metadata. Moreover, even for paper docs, shred jobs often fail because non-shredded docs refer to or allude to shredded docs (which have often freely circulated).
Deborah--the Fed has already done whatever it's done in the way of concealment. The next 5 days probably don't matter all that much. It's too risky for pettifogging antics at this point.
Bottom line here isn't so much the pus that suppurates out of this pustulant boil; that depends on the scope of Pittman's original FOIA requests. No, the 800 pound gorilla here is judicial precedent: the Fed must answer future FOIA requests. Thanks to Mark Pittman, it is open season on the Fed.
R.I.P. Pittman indeed.
In any event, the real issue here is the Second Circuit's precedent, which federal district courts must now consider. I'm guessing there are now about 750 members of the Federal Judiciary, including 9 on SCOTUS. The vast majority are at the district court level, brethren of Judge Christopher Boyko, Judge Jed Rakoff, and Chief Judge Loretta Preska (the latter of whom gave us the Fed defeat at issue here). Can you imagine what these jurists--and their colleagues perhaps worse--would do to an FOIA violator at this point?
The Fed got killed today. If not, Order just left the building.
Why wait for that? Why not start composing FOIA queries here, online? Stuff a few in the queue in say 10 days from now, get them on file.
This waiting for this or that never pans out. What's needed is action, Jackson.
If it causes inflation so that you can't afford to buy gas and bread and so much economic disruption that you lose your job and your house is foreclosed -- well, it's all perfectly legal. And so the records will show.
You'll still need a new currency.
yeah i know i've been helping the USA by buying up silver eagles because this keeps metal workers in jobs but alas they have ran out of eagles so looks like i will have to make do with maples from Oz.
Now if your talking about the currencies for the masses then that will be the new amero they are going to replace the paper US$ with and in order to help the trees, save the earth the new fiat will be digital and will arrive with a digital carbon tax bill because they know what every penny you spent was spent on and will calculate the so called carbon foot print on each purcahse and send you the bill.
History tells us that fiat paper on average only last 40 years and the gold standard was broken in 1971 so it think it's time is up and the banksters will turn your loss into a tidy profit.
You could away try to take back your freedom but with so many people taking bribes and are running the country it's not going to be easy.
I thought it was supposed to have been yesterday (the 2d Cir. order gave them 5 days), but nothing came. When I checked, it said the Fed had 2 weeks to comply. Do you have a link?
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-29/dying-banks-kept-alive-show-secrets-fed-s-data-will-reveal-for-first-time.html
P.S. The Wall Street Journal wouldn't know a true detail if it bit them on the ass.