Bernanke Should Testify on Secret Fed Loans, Cummings Says

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke should testify before a U.S. House of Representatives committee on the central bank’s loans to Wall Street firms during the 2008 financial crisis, Representative Elijah Cummings said.

Cummings, the top Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, requested the hearing in a letter today to the panel’s chairman, California Republican Darrell Issa, according to an e-mailed statement from Cummings’s office. He sent the letter following a Bloomberg Markets magazine report describing how the largest U.S. banks benefited from secret Fed lending.