A Day In The Fed's Vault

Michael Lewis published a great article yesterday regarding The Fed and their recent practices.  Great stuff:

"Last week the Federal Reserve bravely released 894 PDF files containing 29,346 pages that detailed its heroic actions during the financial crisis.  These documents revealed how open-minded the Fed can be when it needs to be. Local governments in Belgium, Japanese fishing cooperatives, the Libyan government and many other unlikely parties received the Fed’s financial aid. Failing U.S. banks, such as Citigroup and Morgan Stanley (MS), were of course handed whatever they wanted, and permitted to post as collateral pretty much anything they could get their hands on: junk bonds, defaulted debt, volatile equities.  To naive critics this came as just more evidence that the Fed had mistaken the wants of a handful of rich people for the needs of the wider society.  Many Fed spokesmen have wisely declined to comment, many times.  Upon seeing how incapable the public is of understanding its wisdom, the Fed judiciously elected to withhold a second, far longer document."
Michael Lewis

The entire article:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-04-12/the-fed-rescue-program-too-bizarre-to-be-true-commentary-by-michael-lewis.html

The Slow-Witted Man

"The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him."
Leo Tolstoy, 1897

This quote appears on the first page of Michael Lewis' new book, "The Big Short". It just was delivered to my office. It looks like a good read and is getting a lot of good press.