Treasury Transparency

Just before the elections Paulson came screaming to Congress that the sky was falling and that he needed $700 billion in unaccountable funds to rescue the economy. Congress, amazingly, actually asked some questions and gave him only part of the money he wanted, and they attached some strings to it. At least that’s what I think we were told happened; that Paulson would get only $350 billion now, with more later if needed, and that there were conditions attached.

Over the past few weeks it seems the conditions are not, emphatically not, being met and then today this item appears in Bloomberg News,

Nov. 10 (Bloomberg) -- The Federal Reserve is refusing to identify the recipients of almost $2 trillion of emergency loans from American taxpayers or the troubled assets the central bank is accepting as collateral.

The Federal Reserve is not the US Government. (I’ve never been real clear on what it is, exactly.) That article, however, says that $2 trillion in loans have been made “from American taxpayers” to unknown firms; banks and financial houses presumably.

Click on the link and read the story, but mostly what it says is that an unimaginable amount of money is gone, nobody knows where it is except the people who gave it away and the people who got it, and nobody is talking.

Except, Treasury officials are claiming that “transparency is good.”