BackFed sheds light on turbulent ’09 with publication of transcripts
The latest materials will shed light on how then-chairman Ben Bernanke and his colleagues debated some of the biggest crisis-era developments
Premium(Jay Mallin/Bloomberg)
Washington: The Federal Reserve is opening its archives from 2009, a tumultuous year for a US economy and global financial system struggling to pull out of the worst crisis and recession in seven decades.
The US central bank on Wednesday in Washington released transcripts and briefing books from the ’09 meetings of Federal Open Market Committee policy makers with the customary five-year lag. The 2008 documents, published last year, ran more than 3,500 pages.
The latest materials will shed light on how then-chairman Ben S. Bernanke and his colleagues debated some of the biggest crisis-era developments, including the Fed’s $1.15 trillion expansion of asset purchases, stress tests of US banks and the government rescue of Bank of America Corp. The transcripts may also give investors clues on how current chair Janet Yellen, then president of the San Francisco Fed bank, approaches decision-making in 2015.
The Fed’s rescue efforts and monetary stimulus led to a backlash from some members of Congress. House lawmakers voted in late 2009 to pass Fed-audit legislation similar to proposals this year to strip the central bank of a shield from monetary- policy examinations. That was changed to a narrower audit of the Fed’s emergency-lending programs as part of the Dodd-Frank law in 2010.
Recession ends
For US officials, 2009 was the year the economy emerged from the deepest recession since the 1930s, a subpar expansion slowed by businesses and households reducing debt and the fallout from the housing crisis. The contraction that began in December 2007 ended in June 2009, the National Bureau of Economic Research determined in September 2010.
As 2009 began, Barack Obama was sworn in as president. Factory orders, retail sales, retirement-plan balances and housing starts were among the myriad statistics pointing downward. On the rise were mortgage delinquencies, government-led bank bailouts, the number of people collecting unemployment benefits and budget deficits.
The 3.6 million jobs lost the year before were the most on record at the time, pushing the nation’s unemployment rate up to 7.3% in December 2008. The rate would peak at 10% in October 2009, with 5.1 million jobs disappearing during the full year.
Bernanke was named Time magazine’s “Person of the Year" for 2009.
The Fed in 1995 began its policy of releasing near-verbatim discussions with the time lag under pressure from Henry Gonzalez, the Democratic chairman of the House Banking Committee in the early 1990s.
The central bank releases minutes of meetings, which take place eight times a year, about three weeks afterward. The minutes summarize meetings without giving direct quotes or identifying policy makers who make remarks. BLOOMBERG.
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