Sunshine doesn’t hurt after all. Bank shares leapt Wednesday despite the Federal Reserve’s detailed disclosure of who got $3.3 trillion of emergency lending during the crisis. That is hardly what investors might have envisaged, given dark warnings from the Fed that such disclosure could endanger financial institutions. The central bank released the data only because of a provision in the Dodd-Frank financial-overhaul bill.
True, it will take time for investors to comb through all the gory details of about 21,000 transactions by multiple emergency Fed lending facilities. And some details may leave firms with egg on their face: Goldman Sachs, which insisted it would have survived the crisis without government assistance, tapped one special Fed facility 84 times to borrow nearly $600 billion in overnight money. Morgan Stanley tapped the facilities more than 200 times.
Even if individual details of the programs aren’t that surprising, the breadth of companies that accessed them is notable. The disclosure shows how far the Fed went in attempting to prop up just about every part of the financial markets, with users ranging from the biggest U.S. and international banks to small firms that peddled complex and often toxic securities, as well as industrial companies such as General Electric, Harley-Davidson and Verizon.