Gretchen Morgenson of the New York Times has picked up on a Bloomberg News report which AT broke here last Tuesday.  The Bloomberg story reported that, from 2008 to 2010, the Federal Reserve Board secretly lent $ 1.2 trillion to banks and other financial institutions around the world to keep the global financial system from failing. The fact and amount of this lending had been previously undisclosed. There was, as we noted, the strong implication in Bloomberg's reporting that the Fed and the U.S. Treasury Department had, at a minimum, tolerated and, at a maximum, encouraged lying by American financial institutions about their liquidity (not to mention sources and uses of funds) at the height of the Crash of '08. In effect, America's largest financial institutions were given a license to lie to current and potential investors and business partners about their solvency in the name of preserving the system. This is not entirely news. There had already been more than a little hint...(Read Full Post)