...any hoo - as I'm at home today and it's raining I've been trawling the interwebs for fun and games (and mainly George Carlin videos) and I came across this interesting piece of news:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid= ... CC61ZsieV4 wrote:The Federal Reserve must for the first time identify the companies in its emergency lending programs after losing a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
Manhattan Chief U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska ruled against the central bank yesterday, rejecting the argument that loan records aren’t covered by the law because their disclosure would harm borrowers’ competitive positions.
The Fed has refused to name the financial firms it lent to or disclose the amounts or the assets put up as collateral under 11 programs, most put in place during the deepest financial crisis since the Great Depression, saying that doing so might set off a run by depositors and unsettle shareholders. Bloomberg LP, the New York-based company majority-owned by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, sued on Nov. 7 on behalf of its Bloomberg News unit.
To summarise what this means is the Federal Reserve has to identify the companies to whom it gave the $1.5 trillion dollars in taxpayers money and it has to list the assets used as collateral for the so-called "loans." Something the Federal Reserve didn't want to do for some reason...
All of which sounds pretty fair as it is after all it is taxpayers money and if I was a U.S. taxpayer I'd be pretty interested where my share went to. But if you read the Bloomberg article you're see this "The Fed has refused to name the financial firms it lent to or disclose the amounts or the assets put up as collateral under 11 programs, most put in place during the deepest financial crisis since the Great Depression, saying that doing so might set off a run by depositors and unsettle shareholders."
So, taxpayers are expected to pay trillions of dollars to banks who're in the poo - but they shouldn't know which banks have received their money because that information might unsettle the bank's shareholders or cause a FINANCIAL APOCALYPSE (ooohhh)...
In fact in the court case the following was put forward by "The Clearing House Assocation" who are ABN Amro, Bank Of America, The Bank Of New York, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, JP Morgan Chase, US Bank and Wells Fargo.
A bunch of really big banks wrote:The Clearing House submits this declaration because the Court's Order threatens to impair the ability of our members to access emergency funds through the New York Fed's Discount Window without suffering the severe competitive harm that public disclosure of their identity will cause.
Our members have accessed the New York Fed's Discount Window with the understanding that the Fed will not publicly disclose information about their borrowing, especially their identity. Industry experience, including very recent and searing experience, has shown that negative rumors about a bank's financial condition - even completely unfounded rumors - have caused competitive harm, including bank runs and failures.

...obviously transparency is a very bad thing. We should all remember that when a bank next asks us about our credit history.
Any hoo - I'm curious to see how this plays out.