In a splashy headline late Wednesday, Bloomberg reported: "Goldman Sachs Took Biggest Loan From Undisclosed 2008 Fed Crisis Program." Oh, those rascals at Goldman were the worst, sighs the average reader. Is this loan as big of a deal as Bloomberg is trying to make it out to be?
Here's Bob Ivry and Bradley Keoun at Bloomberg reporting:
Goldman Sachs & Co., a unit of the most profitable bank in Wall Street history, took $15 billion from the U.S. Federal Reserve on Dec. 9, 2008, the biggest single loan from a lending program whose details have been secret until today.
The program, which peaked at $80 billion in loans outstanding, was known as the Fed's single-tranche open-market operations, or ST OMO. It made 28-day loans to units of 19 banks between March 7, 2008, and Dec. 30, 2008. Bloomberg reported on ST OMO in May, after the Fed released incomplete records on the program. In response to a subsequent Freedom of Information Act request for details, the central bank disclosed borrower names, amounts borrowed and interest rates.
To be sure, this looks bad. There's this secret program that the Fed aggressively tried to keep under wraps, and Goldman was its biggest beneficiary? Well, not exactly.
First of all, this program wasn't so unusual or ground-shaking. As the second half of the article explains (to readers who got that far), it was really just an expansion of the Fed's longstanding open-market operations. The intent with the program was to pour a little pixie dust on the otherwise dead mortgage-backed securities market, since those securities were used as collateral for the loans. Because the Fed doesn't want to alienate its customers, it just likes to keep things secret.
