By Denny Gulino

WASHINGTON (MNI) – What once was the most tightly guarded of
Federal Reserve secrets, the names of the banks that borrow at its
discount window, and how much they borrow, are now on Fed Web sites for
all to see, with a two-year lag.

The first of what will be quarterly disclosures made public Friday,
is for the third quarter of 2010 beginning July 22, the day after the
Dodd-Frank Act requiring the information be made public was signed into
law. Also now available is more detail than ever on the New York Federal
Reserve Bank’s Open Market purchases and sales of U.S. Treasuries and
agency mortgage-backed securities.

Warned ahead of time that the discount window details would be made
public beginning in that quarter, banks were careful in that post-crisis
period to not only avoid the stigma that could be attached to such
borrowing, but not to raise any new questions by going beyond typical
borrowings necessary for usual banking operations.

Open-market operations disclosed were similarly routine, with QE1
having been completed and QE2 not yet begun.

So the latest disclosures lack the revelations that would have been
the case were they of borrowings and Fed operations in those periods
leading up to and including the crisis. The Fed has not ruled out making
even those details public someday, but not now.

Analysts and reporters nevertheless are pouring through the new
disclosures for any tidbits of interest, finding mostly small banks and
the names of dealers already well known.

There are spreadsheets showing bank borrowings, some as little as
$1,000 test amounts as banks demonstrated to their regulators that they
could borrow if they needed to.

Besides the names of banks, there are the rates they paid, the type
of borrowing and the amounts for every discount window transaction. The
collateral is listed in detail as well, whether Treasuries, agencies,
MBS, and whether repos or reverse repos were utilized.

The Fed’s securities lending is detailed, transaction by
transaction and all foreign currency operations necessary to maintaining
the Fed’s portfolio of euro, yen and franc holdings, kept on hand in
case foreign exchange intervention is ever necessary — which it was not
during the disclosure period — gets a full accounting.

While the detail is new the totals for discount window operations
and some foreign exchange transactions have been reported weekly and
quarterly by the Federal Reserve and the New York Fed.

Those transactions related to swap lines maintained with foreign
central banks are also already detailed elsewhere and any extremely rare
foreign exchange intervention is disclosed at the end of every quarter.

The new disclosures are available through the Federal Reserve
Board’s Web site at:

http://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/reform_quarterly_transaction.htm

and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Web site at

http://www.newyorkfed.org/markets/OMO_transaction_data.html.

** MNI Washington Bureau: 202-371-2121 **

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