The Federal Reserves “Doomsday Book” is essentially a private compilation of emergency measures that the Federal Reserve could take in the event of a financial crisis or other market-destabilizing event. The book has never been made public.. It’s existence of the book isn’t secret: Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner references it in his recent financial-crisis book, “Stress Test,” calling it a catalog of “our actual firefighting equipment”.. But Fed officials have refused to release it, and Justice Department officials at a court hearing on Tuesday said the Federal Reserve Bank of New York wanted to keep the book under seal.. It appears the Feds Doomsday book is quite extensive and has a lot of exhibits: at least 651: Mr. Boies said he had obtained three copies of the Doomsday Book, likely under subpoena. One version of the book was published when Mr. Geithner was president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (referenced as Exhibit 7 during the trial). Another version (exhibit 651) was published in 2012, and – Mr. Boies said – he had also obtained a 2014 version of the Doomsday Book.. So which exhibit is this: Geithner leaned on it, as much as he relied on TurboTax when calculating his taxes, when deciding what to do, although it is unclear if Geithner consulted the Doomsday Book when deciding to leak the Feds market-moving, confidential rate-change decisions to Bank of America.. Mr. Boies casually mentioned that Mr. Geithner carried the book around with him during the financial crisis, to which Mr. Geithner quickly responded: “I don’t think I ever carried it around.” He added, “I was shown it at one point”.. “We did occasionally go back and consult it as things were eroding around us,” he said, though he added “I don’t think it would be fair to say I consulted it extensively during that period.” (In his memoir, Mr. Geithner mentions studying the book. “I was not particularly impressed,” he wrote).. Not surprisingly, the near cataclysmic events from 2008 were even worse than the worst-case scenario foreseen in the book: One reason he didn’t lean on the book, he said in his testimony, was because a lot of the emergency measures the Fed ended up using during the financial crisis were “outside the boundaries” of past government interventions and weren’t even in the Doomsday Book.. So considering the US managed to survive the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression (if only for a few more months/years), then the very open, auditable and transparent Fed wouldnt be against sharing what is in the book, right? Wrong.. When Mr. Boies moved to introduce two of the editions of the book into evidence, the New York Fed’s own lawyer, John Kiernan, sprang up from the gallery to chime in: The Fed wanted the “Doomsday Book” kept strictly under seal.. So one wonders, as does the entire world since as the fate of everyone is now in the deus ex hands of the Feds printer and the next global crisis is always just around the corner: just what is contained in the Feds Doomsday Book?? https://youtube/watch?v=HjimppUJTCc
Posted on: Thu, 09 Oct 2014 09:22:24 +0000
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