For anybody who cares about how the country ended up in this precarious economic state, a very big day is coming soon, as information that has been under lock and key for the past five years will be shared with the world.
The Federal Reserve keeps transcripts of its meetings to set monetary policy, and releases them with a five year delay. It does not announce in advance when they will be released, but if the past is a guide, any day now we will be getting full transcripts of the 2007 meetings of the Federal Open Market Committee. Transcripts of all eight regularly scheduled meetings, plus three special emergency sessions to respond to the earliest ripples of the financial crisis, will be posted to the Federal Reserve’s Web site.
This is a big deal. It will be our first official glimpse into policymakers’ deliberations during the crisis, or at least its earliest phases. We will gain a better understanding of what the Fed knew and when it knew it. The release of 2006 transcripts last January was fascinating for the portrait painted of Fed officials failing to grasp the grave peril facing the economy; the 2007 transcripts should show us when and how that assessment changed—and how they came to take some early actions to combat it. Here is what to expect out of the transcripts, based on both minutes of the meetings and my reporting over the years with people who were in the room:
Read More at The Washington Post . Posted By Neil Irwin.
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