Word: fed
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...down the supply chain. Shortly before Christmas, the Federal Reserve Board quietly provided $200 million of support aimed specifically at auto dealers, who have had a difficult time financing their inventories - forcing some of them out of business. The support is being administered through the Fed's Term Asset Backed Securities Loan Facility or TALF, which was created this past autumn to encourage banks to start lending again. To further help the dealers, the Fed eased the eligibility requirements so that inventory financing (and there's plenty of inventory to finance) now qualifies as an "asset" that can be packaged...
...governments of the U.S. and E.U. are faced with another act of "the great bank salvation." This time around it is not clear what the Fed and Treasury will get for their capital. They already hold equity in all of the large financial firms due to recent investment from the TARP. What faces the system now is whether the federal government will end up with de facto control of the private banking system...
...good time is usually had by all - except when the global financial markets are sending out warnings of extreme stress to come. By August 2007, the storm known as the subprime crisis had been gathering for much of the year, and inside the Fed, Timothy F. Geithner, president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank and a vice chairman of the Federal Open Market Committee (which sets interest-rate policy), had quietly been raising red flags among his colleagues. Earlier that month, the European Central Bank had startled traders by pumping close to 100 billion euros into the short-term...
...wasn't a popular view back then. "He had taken a lot of heat" for the position inside the Fed, a colleague says. Some regional Fed presidents thought he was excessively gloomy. As an insider put it, they thought Geithner had been captured by his constituents - the heads of the largest banks and investment firms in New York, most of whom were leveraged to the hilt and deeply vulnerable to turmoil in the mortgage-backed-securities market. But Geithner's view prevailed that week with his boss, Ben Bernanke. A few weeks later, the Fed slashed its key interest rate...
Geithner acknowledges that Treasury and the Fed need to do a better job of explaining their actions. In his defense, he has told friends that there often just hasn't been time. At key moments, "the overwhelming imperative has been to act," he has said. "You would have violated the Hippocratic oath if you didn't." As the economic crisis deepens, the sense of urgency is undiminished. A friend of Geithner's says he believes the U.S. "is still not out ahead" of this problem. "We will be," he has said, "but we're not there...