Fed’s Secrecy During Crisis Limits Effort to Stop Another: View

Nov. 28 (Bloomberg) -- Opposites in many ways, the TeaParty movement and Occupy Wall Street have this in common: Bothhave channeled the public’s not always well-informed anger overthe behavior of banks and government during the financialcrisis. As it turns out, they didn’t know the half of it, andneither did the rest of us, including Congress.

As a story in the January issue of Bloomberg Markets magazine shows, between August 2007 and April 2010, the FederalReserve secretly administered the largest bailout in U.S. historywithout approval or oversight from the legislative branch. Togive a sense of the scale of this effort, as of March 2009, theFed had committed $7.77 trillion, more than half the value ofeverything produced in the U.S. that year, to the rescue.