Economix Blog: Lifting the Veil on the Fed’s 2007 Discussions

Matthew Cavanaugh/European Pressphoto Agency The Federal Reserve building in Washington.

11:46 a.m. | Updated

The Federal Reserve has released the transcripts of its meetings in the pivotal year of 2007, when the housing bubble started to burst and the global financial crisis began.

The transcripts shed light on the decisions that Ben S. Bernanke, the Fed chairman, and other top officials — including Timothy F. Geithner, the current Treasury secretary, who was then president of the New York Fed — were making as the crisis began. They spent much of 2006 underestimating the risks facing the economy before changing tack in 2007 and undertaking the beginnings of an aggressive response.

The transcripts are being issued as part of the Fed’s normal schedule of releasing them publicly five years later.

Over the course of the day, four reporters for The Times — Binyamin Appelbaum, Peter Eavis, Annie Lowrey and Nelson D. Schwartz — will be reading and analyzing the hundreds of pages of documents. Mr. Appelbaum’s article is now online, and will continue to be updated through the day. Mr. Appelbaum, Ms. Lowrey and Mr. Eavis are also tweeting about the transcripts.

Here is a brief look at how that crucial year unfolded, from Mr. Appelbaum:

As the housing market, and then financial markets, and then the broader economy began to unravel, the Federal Reserve in the final months of 2007 moved from complacency to action, not in one smooth motion but in a series of herky-jerky steps. Fed officials struggled to understand what was happening and argued among themselves about how the central bank should respond.

In August, the Fed took the first steps to broaden the availability of funding for financial transactions, perhaps the most important role that it would play during the coming crisis. In September, the Fed lowered benchmark interest rates for the first time in four years, opening the second front in its economic stimulus campaign. And by the end of the year, the Fed had begun the first of what would become a host of new programs intended to pump money into financial markets.

Article source: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/18/lifting-the-veil-on-the-feds-2007-discussions/?partner=rss&emc=rss