The Fed's Lending Reports: Not that Earth-shattering by design

So after much anticipation (though I've got to admit, I wasn't exactly waiting for it with bated breath), the Fed released its official crisis lending report. The idea was that it would shed more light over which banks got the most perks during the Great Bank Bailout and Subsidization period. And, whereas it certainly gives more detail on which specific securities where pledged in return for which emergency facility funds during the crisis - for which you have to dig into several different pages on the Fed's website to get to each facility and each excel report separately. The Fed provided no descriptive aggregations (like how many AA securities that were subsequently downgraded because their underlying loans sucked, did Citigroup pledge across Fed facilities, etc) though, that can be determined by further inspection of the data. Even so, the reports don't really tell us anything we don't already know. Long story short,  spanning 21,000 transactions from December 2007 to July 2010, they don't reveal which banks borrowed what from the Fed’s discount window (the part we wanted to know), while confirming that the biggest banks got the most help from various facilities (the part we already knew).

But hey – the future of the free world was at stake, the Fed did what it had to do, and things would have been much so worse without fearless Ben, Tim and the boys intervening with trillions of manufactured dollars. Bernanke can breathe a sigh of relief. Why? Because he dodged a big bullet and the gun is now empty. He didn't really disclose any earth shattering information in all the various legs of this report. It will take a bit of time to comb through each spreadsheet, but on first glance, beyond the litany of dodgy securities, mostly rated AAA despite all the incompetence of the rating agencies, used to extract more useful funds, it reveals nothing about the manner in which the biggest, most powerful banks gamed the system to survive on federal capital.