Wednesday, December 1, 2010

It Was a Big Dump by the Fed, But Are They Still Constipated?

EPJ's own Bob English comments on the Fed document dump:
It is indeed a deluge. Of course, I zeroed in on the MBS program, and the Fed has given actual prices on what looks like every purchase and sale, which I did not expect. Someone with resources greater than me will undoubtedly reconcile with then-current prices. Then, I looked at Maiden Lane, a much skimpier presentation by far. In fact, all it does is regurgitate a subset of the data already on the NY Fed's website, with no data prior to Sep 30, 2008 (ML was funded in June, 2007). It remains to be seen, then, if BlackRock was simply stuffing the SOMA
What's the Fed hiding? Why no purchase and sales numbers for the Maiden Lane transactions? Why no Maiden Lane data at all for the period June 2007 to September 30, 2008?

1 comment:

  1. Thanks for bringing this comment to the front. Perhaps this was unintentional, but the final three words were truncated:

    "It remains to be seen, then, if BlackRock was simply stuffing the SOMA with ML assets."

    What I was referring to was that BlackRock was purchasing MBS securities on behalf of the NY Fed for the SOMA as part of QE1, and at the same time managing ML. Was BlackRock swapping assets between SOMA and ML through the PD's (an extreme conflict of interest), which is why we're not getting earlier data on ML?

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