This is from William Cohen, writer of a few pretty good books on the financial crisis
Our government agencies continue to do everything in their considerable power to keep hidden information that belongs in the public realm. (so much for that transparent government Obama promised)
Bloomberg News discovered this in its ultimately successful effort to get information on the $1.2 trillion in "secret loans" the Fed doled out during the financial crisis.
Last December, nearly nine months after my Goldman book was published, I received an official-looking package from the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. Slapped on the outside of the envelope was a bright orange sticker about keeping the contents -- a computer disk -- away from "magnets and electric motors" and, of course, the warning "Do Not X- Ray." This, I suspected, was my long-awaited document file about Goldman's dealings with the Federal Reserve in the days leading up to Sept. 22, 2008, when it, along with Morgan Stanley, had the good fortune to be allowed to become a bank holding company with lifesaving unlimited access to short-term funding.
For instance, who knew that at the end of December 2011 Goldman had $44.2 trillion in the notional amount of derivatives contracts on its books, about $1.3 trillion more than it did in 2010? Or that $36 trillion of that amount was for contracts of less than one year in tenor? Or that Goldman had $19 billion in insurance underwriting assets, up nearly 40 percent from the year before? Or that Goldman's book of commercial and industrial loans was $7 billion at the end of 2011, up dramatically from the $829 million it held at the end of 2010? Or that the firm's stash of mortgage-backed securities -- now $1.37 billion -- had nearly doubled what it had at the end of 2010?
But let's not pretend that the Fed's carefully scripted, and untimely, release of a disk of public information to me is even remotely the way FOIA is supposed to work. Where are the documents and e-mails about how Goldman was allowed by the Fed to become a bank holding company? Where are the documents from the SEC about Goldman? Where, for that matter, are the SEC documents related to the short-dated, out-of-the-money puts that investors spent millions of dollars buying in the last week of Bear Stearns's existence? The SEC said it was investigating who bought and sold these puts, but it has never made the results of its investigation public despite my FOIA request.
So, nothing has changed, Obama promised hope and change, we got a dope and the same instead!
Comments(15)