Dollars For Dictators -- Not a Bakken Story

Remember all that money the US Federal Reserve was doling out through its "discount window" to prevent the banking industry from imploding?

Remember that this administration vowed unprecedented openness and was just awarded the Transparency Award?

Remember the two-year fight that the Fed (i.e., Chairman Ben S. Bernanke) has been waging to keep the list of banks taking advantage of these cheap loans secret?

The list of banks is now available.

As interesting as the list is, even more interesting to me is the fact that Mr Bernanke refused to reveal the list until ordered by the court. It was even more interesting to see who sued under the Freedom of Information Act: Bloomberg and Fox News. Note who did not join the suit: CBS ("60 Minutes"); NBC News (CNBC, MSNBC); or ABC News ("Nightline") -- I find that incredible, and all I can say is "thank goodness" for Fox News.

The Fed released the documents after court orders upheld FOIA requests filed by Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News, and News Corp.’s Fox News Network LLC. In all, the Fed released more than 29,000 pages of documents, covering the discount window and several Fed emergency-lending programs established during the crisis from August 2007 to March 2010.

The Supreme Court ruled that the list must be made public. Now we know why the Fed wanted to keep it a secret. Here's a partial list of those banks and some background as provided by Bloomberg.com:

• Largest borrowers: foreign banks; accounted for > 70 percent of the $110 billion borrowed during one week of October 29th, the one week that surged to a record
• Bank of China; China's oldest bank; 2nd largest borrower during a 9-day period, August, 2007
• Arab Banking Corp, 29% owned by the country we just hit with 120 Tomahawks: Libya; the Arab Banking Corp got at least 73 loans from the Fed in the 18 months following the collapse of Lehman
• Bank of Scotland borrowed $11 billion; eventually taken over by Lloyds TSB Group
• Societe Generale SA, France's 2nd largest bank; $5 billion on Oct 29, 2008
• Norinchukin Bank, finances Japan's agricultural, fishing and forestry coops; $6 billion on Oct 29, 2008
• Wachovia Corp was the only US bank among the top five borrowers as the crisis peaked; Wells Fargo eventually bought Wachovia
• Six European banks were among the top 11 companies that sold the most debt overall
• US banks included JP Morgan, Bank of America, Citigroup, and Morgan Stanley

The icing on the cake:

Foreign banks took advantage of Fed lending programs even as their host countries moved to prop them up or orchestrate takeovers

As far as I can tell, this has not been a story for CNBC.