(2010-12-07) Evslin Sanders Fed Subsidies Transparency

Tom Evslin credits Bernie Sanders with forcing the Federal Reserve to document its Credit Crisis 2008 Subsidy (Bail-Out) programs. You would expect the Fed to be more active in a banking crisis than in normal times (although you might have also expected the Fed to see some of the problems which led to the crisis). What you would not expect is to find that the chairman of the NY Fed at the time, Stephen Friedman, was a director of Goldman Sachs, which hit the Fed up for help 52 times and had a high balance of $18 billion after quickly turning itself into a bank to qualify for aid. It does not help that he was given a waiver by the Fed to continue as chair AND that, according to the NYTImes, he bought shares in Goldman while that bank was being bailed out by the Fed. BTW, two of the other nine members of the board of the NY Fed were the chief executives of GE and J P Morgan, both of which also received Fed support. Other interesting information is that the Fed apparently felt that it also had to bailout investment funds headquartered in the Cayman Islands (where people and funds go to escape taxes), the Korea Development Bank, and the Arab Banking Corporation based in Bahrain (over $23 billion in loans at rates as low as .25%). Oligarchy.