Dear Friend and Reader,<\/p>\n
DO YA’LL REMEMBER those images from the early days of the glorious Iraqi liberation? You know the ones where Iraqis were seen walking into their banks and grabbing anything they could? Or the stories of Saddam Jr. pulling up to the treasury with three tractor trailers to haul off 900 million dollars<\/a> in tidy stacks of 100 dollar bills?<\/p>\n Seems as if the Bush Administration and their friends have taken a page from the Hussein family playbook.<\/p>\n While we all wait to see how the 700 billion dollar bailout package will trickle down to our pocketbooks, the Federal Reserve Bank has been quietly cutting deals to the tune of nearly two trillion dollars with banking groups like Citigroup and Goldman Sachs — twice the size of the better known bailout deal. Who else got this federal money, and what collateral was provided for those loans is what Bloomberg News wants to know<\/a>.<\/p>\n According to Bloomberg News, the Federal Treasury has been issuing emergency loans to American banks long before Wall Street and AIG bellied up to the cash bar. Since May of this year Bloomberg has sought information about these loans, but the government has disclosed few details of the loans. Until now, the media has given little attention to the Reserve plan, but that should soon change. Reporters are beginning to ask questions about the supposed transparency of the better known bailout, but the opacity of those answers won’t remotely compare to the wall of secrecy they’ll encounter when they begin to ask questions about the larger Reserve handout.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The American taxpayer is entitled to know the risks, costs and methodology associated with the unprecedented government bailout of the U.S. financial industry,” said Matthew Winkler<\/a>, the editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News, a unit of New York-based Bloomberg LP, in an e-mail.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The Federal Reserve, meanwhile, has for months pleaded “too busy to stop now!” when Bloomberg requested detailed disclosure of the loans. Now the Fed says it’s none of Bloomberg’s business. Or rather, that the documents kept at the Federal Reserve Bank in New York aren’t subject to the Freedom of Information Act.<\/p>\n Bloomberg disagrees, and this week filed suit to get that information. And it’s not just Bloomberg that wants that information. Biztimes Daily quotes others in the financial community:<\/p>\n ‘The collateral is not being adequately disclosed, and that’s a big problem,’ Dan Fuss, vice chairman of Boston-based Loomis Sayles & Co., told Bloomberg. ‘In a liquid market, this wouldn’t matter, but we’re not. The market is very nervous and very thin.’<\/p>\n ‘It’s your money; it’s not the Fed’s money,’ billionaire Ted Forstmann, senior partner of Forstmann Little & Co. in New York, told Bloomberg. ‘Of course there should be transparency.’<\/p><\/blockquote>\n According to The <\/a><\/em>Small Business Times<\/a><\/em>, eight of the eleven programs loaning these funds were created in the last fifteen months.<\/p>\n Bloomberg’s pursuit of this story since last May and the recent development of the loan programs suggests that many more people in the financial community knew the economy was about to take a seriously negative turn than recent reports would have us believe. Perhaps they didn’t know when the earthquake would hit, but Citigroup and others must have been feeling the tremors for at least a year now.<\/p>\n What remains to be known is who is getting all this money. The feds argue it’s very sensitive information, but the skeptical (not to mention the paranoid) among us can only believe the real sensitivity at stake here is constitutional. Do we have a right to know who’s getting our tax money or not? And to what lengths will the outgoing administration hide who’s getting our compulsory public tithe?<\/p>\n The Aleph Blog<\/em><\/a> suggests the following reasons for hiding information about the transactions:<\/p>\n Bloomberg’s suit against the Federal Reserve should test these possibilities, pointedly. Now to see if our judicial system will side with the Reserve Bank or toss this one back on its benumbed citizens…<\/p>\n Suit filed as: Bloomberg LP v. Federal Reserve, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan)<\/em><\/p>\n In related economic news:<\/p>\n Paulson “shifting focus” of bailout money<\/a>. (nytimes.com)<\/p>\n GM asks for a bailout.<\/a> (nytimes.com).<\/p>\n The government gives AIG $40 billion more<\/a> (npr.org).<\/p>\n Allen Greenspan<\/a>‘s deathbed admission (npr.org).<\/p>\n Yours & truly,<\/p>\n Shanna Philipson<\/strong><\/p>\n Dear Friend and Reader, DO YA’LL REMEMBER those images from the early days of the glorious Iraqi liberation? You know the ones where Iraqis were seen walking into their banks and grabbing anything they could? Or the stories of Saddam Jr. pulling up to the treasury with three tractor trailers to haul off 900 million … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":262,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1,14],"tags":[36,562,52,561,298,35],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6040"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6040"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6040\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6040"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6040"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6040"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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