financial audit is annual. Here is the latest audit: http://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_fedfinancials.htm Click on balance sheet then current release (data added after 2014 will not have been audited yet.) The fed also issues quarterlies that review balance sheet changes since the last quarter. If you have unlimited time, I don't, you can break it down much further I think you are lying, to be perfectly frank, when you say you want all this information. I think what you really want is to have someone spoon feed you like baby pablum. Do not expect me to do that.
So....that says what that is relevant? That Bernanke put on his angry face? This note from the ethics page made me laugh so hard, iced tea shot out of my nose.
You can think I'm lying about whatever you want. I think you're a propaganda laden shill. *shrug* You won't even tell us which Fed institution you work at. I certainly don't want anything spoon fed from you, and wouldn't believe anything you said regardless. If you told me the sky was blue, I'd have to seriously go back and check to make sure you weren't spinning it. I've read a lot of those audits before, and paid particular notes to things like "other liabilities" and "other assets" and the like. I'll promise to go through your links in full tomorrow, but there's absolutely no doubt in my mind it won't answer all the questions I - or anyone else who wants a full audit - will have. For example, I remember it listing values of swap contract, but no material nature to what those swaps represent, who the counter parties were, etc. No detail. What is the Fed's relationship with other central banks? With other financial institutions? How has it helped them (or not helped them) in the past with loans, with notes, etc. What is the risk with those institutions? What countries do they represent? Etc...and on and on. Every single financial transaction the Fed makes should be public record. Every single one. Are you here to tell us all the transactions are available public record?
All transactions are available to the public. All. The Fed serves many extremely important administrative roles. But in everything that it does, it must obey the statutory laws made by Congress.
Right. All transactions are available to the public (when they are forced to be public by law or judge)...after fighting FOIA requests...LOL! You're a trip, piezoe.
This was about 2009 or -10 wasn't it? The transactions were public in the broad sense, but if I recall correctly the Board of Governors did not want the names of specific banks that accessed TARP to be immediately released because they were concerned that those banks' clients might withdraw their deposits further weakening the banks. Eventually, to the best of my knowledge, all TARP participants were identified. It isn't unusual for the Fed to be tight lipped regarding problems at specific institutions for the reason I mentioned. The transactions themselves will always appear in the Fed's books, but the names of counter parties may not be immediately known to the public. The Fed is charged with maintaining the stability of the banking system, but if in their judgement stability might be threatened by immediate release of counter party names, they may temporarily withhold that information. The court may intervene, and the Fed will in any case obey the decision of the court.
Yeah, the Fed warned everyone that release of the info would cause market instability and threaten financial growth, etc, yadda yadda yadda - which sounds familiar to the warning on the Audit the Fed bill. Problem is, after it was ordered released, nothing happened at all. Oops. "We're totally transparent! Everything is posted online - after a Federal Court order!" What a laugh! Just curious, but if information regarding all transactions was publicly available, why would there ever be a need for a FOIA request in the first place?
Fox loses FOIA suit against Federal Reserve Hannah Bergman | Freedom of Information | Feature | July 31, 2009 A federal judge ruled against Fox News Thursday in a key Freedom of Information Act case involving bailout-related documents held by the Federal Reserve Board. Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein in the U.S. District Court in Manhattan ruled that the Federal Reserve Board in Washington had properly withheld more than 6,000 pages of documents from Fox because the records fell under the FOIA exemption protecting trade secrets and confidential information. Fox sought information about the Federal Reserve’s emergency lending program, known as the discount window. Hellerstein also ruled that the 12 regional Federal Reserve banks are not government agencies. Therefore, he held, the Board in Washington was not obligated to search the records of the regional banks in response to Fox’s FOIA request. “It may be, as Fox argues, that no [Federal Reserve bank] has a FOIA office to which FOIA requests may be submitted, that the only FOIA office for the Federal Reserve System is in the Board, and if Fox cannot obtain documents from the Board, it will be deprived of obtaining any meaningful documents enabling a public accounting of the Board’s Discount Window loan program," Hellerstein wrote. "Whether or not this is so, it does not alter the fact that Fox served its requests only upon the Board and that the definition of a Board record is limited by statute." According to a Reuters report, Fox released a statement saying, ‘We respect the judge's decision, but we will probably appeal.” Hellerstein's ruling marks the first time a court has so clearly and expansively dealt with the question of whether the regional banks are subject to FOIA as government agencies. However, prior court rulings in other cases had indicated the banks were not government agencies subject to FOIA and the banks had also long maintained this. Bloomberg News also has a FOIA suit similar to Fox’s pending in the same court. Judge Loretta A. Preska in that case ordered additional briefing on the question of whether the regional Federal Reserve banks are government agencies, but has not yet ruled on the matter. Fox is also pursuing another FOIA suit against the Treasury Department for other bailout records. There has been no decision in that case yet, either. Finally, The New York Times has a pending FOIA suit against both the Federal Reserve Board and Treasury Department for similar documents. That suit, filed much later, is still in its early stages. The Fed agreed only to process the newspaper's requests, which it had not yet done when the statutory deadline for processing the requests had passed.
dailybeast The Sane Case for Auditing the Fed The Federal Reserve, which was just caught playing footsie with Goldman Sachs, is as shadowy as it is powerful. So why can’t Congress bring itself to actually audit the damn thing? If you want to get a sense of just how incredibly powerful the Federal Reserve really is, forget about interest rates, reserve requirements, or even the ways in which a random nose-pick or burp by Janet Yellin during lunch at a Jackson Hole delicatessen might send markets soaring or crashing. Instead, think about this: In an age utterly bereft of bipartisanship, auditing the nation’s central bank is one of the few issues on which Rand Paul and Elizabeth Warren agree. So does everyone else. Polls consistently show anywhere between 70 percent and 80 percent of Americans supporting an audit that would not just open the Fed’s ledger books but peer into exactly how monetary policy gets set. Just a couple of weeks ago, the House of Representatives passed The Federal Reserve Transparency Act by an overwhelming vote of 333-92; a majority of House Democrats voted for an audit while just one Republican voted against the bill. Yet despite overwhelming public and congressional support for an audit, it’s just not going to happen. What is it about the Fed that inspires such solidarity among its critics? Ever since its creation during the Woodrow Wilson era, it’s been a favorite target of everyone from right-wing conspiracists who fear the Fed is simply another cog in an international Jewish banking conspiracy to left-wing populists who see it as both a cause and effect of globalized capital. Because it controls the money supply of the planet’s biggest economy and because it operates so opaquely, it’s an obvious place to project all sorts of anxieties about large, impersonal forces beyond our reach that sharply affect, if not actually control, virtually all aspects of our daily lives. But one needn’t wade into the fever swamps of conspiracy to see the Fed as an inherently problematic institution. The central bank is explicitly tasked with the fundamentally incompatible duties of conducting stable monetary policy, promoting full employment, acting as a lender of last resort, and regulating the banks it works with. Good luck with all that. Also, while it’s technically independent, the federal government exerts massive political pressure on the Fed and appoints its chair and board of governors. As The Washington Post’s Robert J. Samuelson documented in his 2008 book The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath, the Fed’s successful tactics to curb inflation in the early 1980s necessarily meant increased unemployment as interest rates spiked upwards, making it tougher for producers and consumers to spend. And while President Reagan and Fed Chair Paul Volcker technically acted independently of one another, there’s no question that the two unofficially coordinated their policy actions—as did Presidents Bush and Obama with Ben Bernanke during the Great Recession. But one needn’t wade into the fever swamps of conspiracy to see the Fed as an inherently problematic institution. In 2011, a Government Accountability Office (PDF) audit of Fed activities during 2008 found that the central bank had made previously unknown loans to various financial institutions while also waiving any number of conflict-of-interest regulations and other legal niceties. Leftist Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who had called for the audit, grossly overstated the actual amount of dollars put into play, but his main point about the Fed bailouts still holds: “This is a clear case of socialism for the rich and rugged, you’re-on-your-own individualism for everyone else.” More recently, Pro Publica’s bombshell story about funny business at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York will only increase calls for a truly wide-ranging, independent audit. Bank examiner Carmen Segarra, who the Fed tasked with monitoring Goldman Sachs in an effort to learn how and why the 2008 financial crisis unfolded, was fired from her post after seven months. She walked away with 46 hours of secretly recorded conversations and other documentation amounting to an “unignorable truth,” in the words of journalist Michael Lewis: that one of America’s biggest investment banks had co-opted its supposed overseer. “You sort of knew that the regulators were more or less controlled by the banks,” Lewis wrote. “Now you know.” The Fed’s operational furtiveness—there’s a reason why William Greider titled his 1989 history of the bank Secrets of the Temple—is hugely at odds with growing interest in transparency in all aspects of contemporary life. How is it that we can know more about the coffee beans we buy at the grocery store than how our money gets made? “Trust in all branches of federal government at or near record lows,” reports Gallup. Who can blame us? The entire 21st century has been a clusterfuck cloaked in official secrecy. Trust us, the Bush administration said, about weapons of mass destruction and its ability to keep taxes and spending low. Trust us, the Obama administration said, about spying on Americans and restarting the economy through “shovel-ready” programs. Does anyone wonder why only 43 percent of Americans have a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in the executive branch? And just 28 percent in the legislative branch? In announcing the results of the successful House vote to finally take a look at the inner workings of the Fed, Rep. Paul Broun, the Republican sponsor of the bill, said that it’s passage had brought “us one step closer towards bringing much-needed transparency to our nation’s monetary policy.” Yeah, not so much. Despite such a lopsided vote in the House, the measure will die in the Senate. It wasn’t voted on before the pre-election recess, and Majority Leader Harry Reid will refuse to bring the matter up for a vote before the current congressional term expires in January. Irony alert: Reid himself co-sponsored bills in the ’90s calling for Fed audits. Reid hasn’t explained exactly why he won’t allow a vote on the bill, which has 30 co-sponsors. He’s keeping his reasons secret, which means that the Fed’s secrets are safe for at least a little while longer. And that trust in government will keep shrinking, just like the value of a dollar has over the life of the Federal Reserve.
There are plenty of issues that the Fed may be fairly criticized on. But transparency of their transactions is not one of them. To maintain, or even to suggest, that the Fed is not already independently audited, is a blatantly political act as deceitful as any. The above report is a fine example of rehashing very old hack reporting from years ago disguised as up to date news.