SHELL GAME DE LUXE
“None of your beeswax. Shut up and trust us.” doesn’t cut it.
Star Chamber economic largess and the resultant vast, unlit chasms of uncertainty due to the deliberate withholding of data are inimical to confidence, to support and to attempted recovery to normalcy and fiercely serve to undermine them .
$2 trillion comes to nearly $7,000 apiece when spread over a 300 million population. And that’s just the amount so far stealthily slipped into the coffers over the past three months.
The Federal Reserve refused a request by Bloomberg News to disclose the recipients of more than $2 trillion of emergency loans from U.S. taxpayers and the assets the central bank is accepting as collateral.
[snip]
The Fed responded Dec. 8, saying it’s allowed to withhold internal memos as well as information about trade secrets and commercial information. The institution confirmed that a records search found 231 pages of documents pertaining to some of the requests.
“If they told us what they held, we would know the potential losses that the government may take and that’s what they don’t want us to know,” said Carlos Mendez, a senior managing director at New York-based ICP Capital LLC, which oversees $22 billion in assets.
[snip]
Total Fed lending exceeded $2 trillion for the first time Nov. 6. It rose by 138 percent, or $1.23 trillion, in the 12 weeks since Sept. 14, when central bank governors relaxed collateral standards to accept securities that weren’t rated AAA.
[snip]
The Fed lent cash and government bonds to banks that handed over collateral including stocks and subprime and structured securities such as collateralized debt obligations, according to the Fed Web site.
[snip]
“Americans don’t want to get blindsided anymore,” Mendez said in an interview. “They don’t want it sugarcoated or whitewashed. They want the complete truth. The truth is we can’t take all the pain right now.”
The Bloomberg lawsuit said the collateral lists “are central to understanding and assessing the government’s response to the most cataclysmic financial crisis in America since the Great Depression.” Source
These books and ledger are our books and ledgers.
Hi!
Just popping in to tell you I’ve completely replaced the template and gone back to the new Blogger comments, which even includes an anonymous option. The comments are private and stay on my blog, not spread out through the bloggyland.
I miss you.
Comment by Hill — December 13, 2008 @ 4:02 am on Saturday the 13th