December 12, 2011
The Federal Reserve Board is a perverse animal. While ostensibly a public institution, the banking industry has the extraordinary privilege of being able to pick 5 of the 12 members of its most important governing body, the Open Market Committee (FOMC). The banks also get to have 7 other representatives sit in on the FOMC’s secret meetings. Given this structure, it is not surprising that people who do not believe that the banks necessarily place the interest of the general public first are suspicious of the Fed.
Robert Samuelson is nonetheless outraged that anyone could question the neutrality of this institution. He attacks a piece by Bloomberg News that called attention to the Fed’s secret lending during the financial crisis as “slander.” Samuelson argues that the loans were not secret, the Fed disclosed the amounts being lent under the programs, just not the identities of the borrowers. He argues that it was necessary not to disclose the identity of the borrowers in order to avoid the risk of creating runs on troubled borrowers.
Samuelson neglected to mention that the Fed refused to release the identities of the institutions receiving the loans available even after the fact. The names of these institutions were only made public as a result of a bill sponsored by Ron Paul and Alan Grayson for auditing the Fed. A version of this legislation was eventually included as an amendment to the Dodd-Frank bill. A successful lawsuit by Bloomberg also led to the release of additional data on Fed loans. In other words, the Fed tried very hard to keep the identity of its borrowers secret even long after the release of the identity of borrowers could have had any impact on their financial situation.
The point of the Bloomberg analysis in question is that making money available to banks during a liquidity crisis involves a substantial subsidy. The banks that have access to the Fed’s lending are advantaged over institutions that do not have access. This allows them to profit off public money when they lend it out.
It may be desirable to allow this profit in the context of a financial crisis, since it would be harmful to the economy to see a financial collapse, but there is no reason that the public should not expect some quid pro quo in exchange for the profits it gave to the banks. The Bloomberg analysis is intended to give the public an estimate of the size of the subsidy it gave to the banks, and in particular the nation’s largest banks, through the Fed’s lending windows. It was an extremely valuable public service.
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