Fed Releases Thousands Of Pages Of Secret Loan Docs from the Financial Crisis

The Federal Reserve released thousands of pages of secret loan documents under court order, almost three years after Bloomberg LP first requested details of the central bank’s unprecedented support to banks during the financial crisis.


The records — 894 files in PDF form that must be individually opened and read — reveal for the first time the names of financial institutions that borrowed directly from the central bank through the so-called discount window. The Fed provided the documents after the U.S. Supreme Court this month rejected a banking industry group’s attempt to shield them from public view.

“This is an enormous breakthrough in the public interest,” said Walker Todd, a former Cleveland Fed attorney who has written research on the Fed lending facility. “They have long wanted to keep the discount window confidential. They have always felt strongly about this. They don’t want to tell the public who they are lending to.”

Rest of the report here…

Secret documents can be downloaded here…

The documents are very long and will comb through those documents. But here is one document.



The day Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, on September 15, 2008, outstanding primary, secondary and other credit extensions to the banks from the Fed, appear to have looked like this:

Update:

JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), the second- largest U.S. bank by assets, borrowed at least $5.9 billion from the Federal Reserve’s discount window over six months during the height of the financial crisis. Read on.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) tapped the Federal Reserve’s discount window at least five times since September 2008, according to central bank data that contradict an executive’s testimony last year. Read on.