This post is a guest contribution by Paul Kasriel* of The Northern Trust Company.

On November 7, 2008, Bloomberg LP sued the Federal Reserve Board under terms of the Freedom of Information Act to obtain the names of borrowers of funds from the Federal Reserve as well as lists of the collateral posted by the borrowers. On August 25, 2009, a U.S. District judge ruled in favor of Bloomberg, ordering the Federal Reserve Board to turn over to Bloomberg the requested information within five days. At this writing, the Fed has yet to comply and has yet made a decision to appeal the ruling. The Fed has been reluctant to reveal the names of its borrowers allegedly out of a concern that such a revelation could have an adverse competitive impact on the borrowers.

The reason I bring this up is that it is similar

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Links to some interesting papers that I recently read.

The first comes from a conference on financial markets held at the start of this month at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Last fall, V.V. Chari, Larry Christiano, and Pat Kehoe received a lot of attention (e.g., Tabarrok, Avent, Economist, Kwak, Bonddad, and Thoma [1], [2], [3],) for noting that aggregate lending by banks was in fact increasing during the period in which many analysts were describing it as sharply curtailed. At the Chicago conference, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston economists Ethan Cohen-Cole, Burcu Duygan-Bump, Jose Fillat, and Judit Montoriol-Garriga argued that those aggregate numbers conceal some very significant compositional trends, namely, previously existing lines of credit were being drawn on by borrowers and a sharply increased fraction of lending was consumed by securities originally intended for securitization

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A couple of great questions came in on the Seeking Alpha version of this morning's post about run-of-the-mill bear markets and I thought it would be useful to post the questions here and how I answered them.Why do you think we won't have a decline similar to what we had in '00-'03, which was a lot more than 30%?Markets cut in half every so often; the great depression, the mid 1970's; the start of this decade and I also know there was a depression in the 1870's but do not know what the market did then, there was also a bank panic in 1907 that lead to a 37% decline that year. If you notice you see the gaps in time ranging from 22 years on up.I believe the reason for this is that the market "can't" cut in half so soon after doing ...