Appeals Court Denies Federal Reserve Coverup Bid

Bloomberg filed a freedom of information act request to get information on the Fed's bailout of banks and other financial institutions about 2 years ago, and true to form, their response to a perfectly reasonable request for information has been delay and litigation.

They lost at the circuit level, and they lost at the appeals court level, and now the appeals court has denied them an en banc rehearing, so unless the Supreme court deigns to hear the case, they are going to have to turn over the information:

The Federal Reserve will have to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court if it wants to avoid having to disclose details of its emergency lending programs to banks bailed out with taxpayer money during the financial crisis.

The U.S. 2d Circuit Court of Appeals denied the Fed's motion on Friday to rehear the case in which Bloomberg LP, the parent of Bloomberg News and News Corp's Fox News Network sought information on the U.S. central bank's emergency lending programs that began in late 2007.

The programs, designed to shore up the financial markets, more than doubled the Fed's balance sheet to well over $2 trillion, especially in the wake of the September 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers.

I am not sure how much of this is just the fetish that the Federal Reserve has for secrecy, and how much is an attempt to cover up behaviors which might be illegal or otherwise appear corrupt.

My guess is that it is a bit of both.

But in either case, absent the Supreme Court taking this up, it appears that we may have some very dull reading of some rather interesting events over the next few months.

Older posts on this are here.