Fed Once-Secret Loan Crisis Data Compiled by Bloomberg Released to Public

www.bloomberg.com...

Bloomberg News today released spreadsheets showing daily borrowing totals for 407 banks and companies that tapped Federal Reserve emergency programs during the 2007 to 2009 financial crisis. It’s the first time such data have been publicly available in this form.

To download a zip file of the spreadsheets, go to http://(link tracking not allowed)/Bloomberg-Fed-Data. For an explanation of the files, see the one labeled “1a Fed Data Roadmap.”

The day-by-day, bank-by-bank numbers, culled from about 50,000 transactions the U.S. central bank made through seven facilities, formed the basis of a series of Bloomberg News articles this year about the largest financial bailout in history.

“Scholars can now examine the data and continue the analysis of the Fed’s crisis management,” said Allan H. Meltzer, a professor of political economy at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and the author of three books on the history of the U.S. central bank.

The data reflect lending from the Asset-Backed Commercial Paper Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility, the Commercial Paper Funding Facility, the Primary Dealer Credit Facility, the Term Auction Facility, the Term Securities Lending Facility, the discount window and single-tranche open market operations, or ST OMO.

Congress required the Fed to post data to its website in December 2010 on six broad-based programs, its assistance to Bear Stearns Cos. and American International Group Inc. (AIG) and more general information on its mortgage-backed securities purchases and so-called foreign-currency liquidity swaps. Those data were presented in spreadsheets that made it difficult to gauge how much individual banks were borrowing from the various programs on any given day.

Some reported totals from media outlets and government studies varied widely. In connection with today’s release, here’s a by-the-numbers explanation of the variations:

$1.2 trillion -- The Fed’s actual lending to banks and financial companies at its single-day peak, Dec. 5, 2008, through the seven programs Bloomberg News studied in depth.

Emergency measures that targeted specific companies -- Bear Stearns, AIG, Citigroup Inc. and Bank of America Corp. -- were excluded from Bloomberg’s analysis because they were previously disclosed. Loans to these companies from the other seven programs were included.

Bloomberg excluded foreign-currency liquidity swaps because names of commercial banks that borrowed under the program haven’t been disclosed to the public.

If a bank borrowed $1 billion overnight for 100 nights, Bloomberg’s analysis would show that the bank had a $1 billion balance at the Fed for 100 days; the GAO method that produced the $16 trillion total would sum up those transactions to $100 billion, even though the bank never owed more than 1 percent of that total.

In its memo, the Fed said it was incorrect to write, as Bloomberg did, that banks “reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates.”

“Most of the Federal Reserve’s lending facilities were priced at a penalty over normal market rates so that borrowers had economic incentives to exit the facilities as market conditions normalized, and the rates that the Federal Reserve charged on its lending programs did not provide a subsidy to borrowers,” the Fed said.

An October 2008 report by Daniel Thornton, a vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, said the primary credit rate, which is paid by most borrowers from the Fed’s discount window, had been “consistently lower” than the certificate of deposit and Eurodollar rates since March 2008.

Looks like they're finally falling under intense scrutiny and the public is going to be pretty angry seeing as not many people benefitted from the bankster rescue. They received this money to help people who needed their mortgages modified as well as loans to help small businesses, yet people continuously were turned down and small businesses had to shutter their stores while corporations flourished.

2012 is looking to be an interesting year.

thanks for the heads up

i will try to digest this info...

(which on the surface appears to be an attempt by the Fed to try to re-write the insider history of Fed actions & TBTF banks and other 'Mammon' mongers

reply to post by St Udio


I agree. Any rewriting needs to be blocked before it can begin, but I'm afraid it probably already has.

I wish I could've commented more about this, but I'm really not great, or even good, at crunching numbers. I hope you or another member downloads the file and can give this thread a better analysis.

reply to post by Afterthought


Yes and these institutions should have been left to fail, there can not be any balancing of the economy when they are keeping dinosaurs alive. If you cannot keep your head afloat without government intervention, your company is simply outdated and has become obsolete, hence a dinosaur. Let innovation rise to the top, befor we have had a seperating of the wheat from chaff, now all the chaff has taken over, that is why we are doomed to see an economic Scatstorm very soon.
I mean this definition:

scat 3 (skt)
n.
Excrement, especially of an animal; dung.

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[Origin unknown.]