MDM, wrote on Wed, 05 August 2009 18:33 |
the sound is out of phase from how I hear it on my laptop.
what's happening probably is that you're listening in mono and you hear no audio.
youtube behaves 'oddly' sometimes.
the lady in the video says that although it's her job and they've had 8 months to research a 'missing' trillion dollars, she doesn't know who the Fed gave it to, and that they 'are working on getting that information'
so I don't think what you mention applies, Jon.
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Ok, it works on headphones, but very noisy...
The first thing he asks is about Lehmann brothers, well that's already been answered by Bernanke in a previous interview as I recall.
Then he's talking about a trillion dollar expansion in the balance sheet, what you're referring to as a "missing" trillion.
If you look at the balance sheets for the period (I know you hate actually looking at facts and figures, but the man's going on about the balance sheet so let's look at the balance sheet) he's talking about (you hear him say "since last september" and "8 months", from which we can deduce that we're talking about september 2008 to may 2009), we do indeed find an expansion of the balance sheet of around a trillion.
A big chunk of that was the aforementioned liquidity swaps, still around a quarter of a trillion at that time, a couple of hundred billion extra in treasury securities, notes and bonds, term auction credit up by 300 billion, mortgage backed securities up 450 billion, "other loans" down by 130 billion though, and some other bits and pieces.
Big scary numbers, but none of it "missing", any more than the money in liquidity swaps is "missing".
He then starts talking about a Bloomberg report of "Off the book transactions", from what I can find out he's talking about this article
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=washingtonstory&s id=aGq2B3XeGKok
Which doesn't say what he appears to either think or be implying it does. It refers to money already spent or lent (on ON the books) and further commitments by the government (Treasury and Fed), money that has not yet been used and is not off the books.