Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveZ
To better understand the role of the Office of The Inspector General of the Federal Reserve, please review the OIG's Semiannual Report to Congress: October 1, 2008--March 31, 2009 ( http://www.federalreserve.gov/oig/sa..._2009.htm#6063).
The FRB OIG is authorized a total staff of 49 people, some positions of which are unfilled, and at least 11 of which are section chiefs or senior managers, and 28 are auditors and investigators. That's not a lot of staff considering all that is on the OIG's plate.
It is normal for the Office Head to appear before Congress some time after submission of an annual or semi-annual report. The date of the tape (05/08/09) would seem to indicate the appearance may have been in consonance with the semi-annual report. If that's the case, Ms. Coleman would have been testifying before the committee to answer questions regarding the semi-annual report and not broad-brush questions.
The next step in the process is for the Congressperson to issue "Questions For The Record" (QFR) and the agency (e.g., FRB) would have normally around ten days to respond to the QFR. If the questions heard on the tape were presented to the FRB OIG as QFRs (don't you love all these acronyms?), then he would have his answers in writing. Any move by the public to get those answers can only occur by soliciting from the Congressperson and that committee for the answers, or filing a Freedom of Information Act request to the FRB OIG.
So, there may be more to all of this than the short video and the impression it left. |
Perhaps this applies ???
"Congressman Grayson demanded details from Bernanke on a half trillion dollars in liquidity swaps to foreign central banks undertaken by the Federal Reserve, apparently under the radar and in the dead of night. Demonstrating that he and his staff had done their fact-checking, Grayson noted that in 2007 these swaps with overseas central banks were a mere $24 billion, but had swelled to a staggering $553 billion in 2008 with the onset of the Global Economic Crisis."
"The exchange between Grayson and Bernanke appears almost Kafkaesque in its reality-defying character, conveyed in the following, as a clearly uncomfortable Fed Chairman provides a tortured explanation regarding this half trillion dollar transaction:
Bernanke: "Those are swaps that were done with foreign central banks..."
Grayson: "So who got the money?"
Bernanke: "Financial institutions in Europe and other countries..."
Grayson: "Which ones?"
Bernanke: "I don't know."
Grayson: "Half a trillion dollars and you don't know who got the money?"
Bernanke: "Um, um, the loans go to the central banks and they then put them out to their institutions..."
And then this...
"
However, the historical record, especially in the last 20 years, clearly shows that the Federal Reserve is influenced politically, either through the executive branch and the power of the President to reappoint the Fed Chairman, or through the large financial institutions on Wall Street, which have a level of access to Fed decision-making not available to any other category of citizens. More importantly, since the onset of the current financial and economic crisis, the Federal Reserve and its chairman have proven to be highly fallible, having made many errors in judgment, not the least being their original overly-optimistic pronouncements when the first tremors from the sub-prime meltdown arose."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sheldo..._b_243795.html
Thanks for all the posts...I have learned quite a bit reading !