By Francesco Guerrera, US finance and business editor
[Roll of drums, spotlight on the New York Federal Reserve] And the answer is: 161 pages of pretty incomprehensible documents.
The question, asked by politicians and investors, was: what securities does the Fed hold as a result of its multi-billion dollar rescues of Bear Stearns and AIG during the crisis ?
The Fed gets high marks for effort. The reams of documents released today are a tabulated list of all the securities held in the Fed’s “Maiden Lane” portfolios (named after the location of the NY Fed headquarters).
But in order to get any meaningful information out of the data, users will have to input the ID numbers of each security into their Bloomberg terminal and get more granular detail on the type of assets held by the government – a herculean effort that could take days to complete.
The only aggregate number provided by the authorities is the nominal (as opposed to market) value of the securities. But even that is not much help as the Fed did not reveal the corresponding value when it took over the portfolios.
For me, the one piece of mildly interesting information was that the Fed keeps the cash portions of these portfolios in an account managed by none other than Goldman Sachs – the Wall Street firm whose ties to the government have been under heightened scrutiny.
But even that not-so-stunning revelation cannot dispel the feeling that this was a pretty futile exercise in open government.
