May 12 (Bloomberg) — Representative Alan Grayson, a Florida Democrat, chastised Inspector General Elizabeth Coleman for what he deemed a lack of oversight of the central bank’s off-balance-sheet transactions.

A YouTube video titled “Is Anyone Minding the Store at the Federal Reserve?” was posted a day after Coleman’s May 5 testimony to a House Financial Services subcommittee.

“Do you know who received that $1 trillion-plus that the Fed extended and put on its balance sheet since last September?” Grayson asked.

Coleman responded by saying she didn’t know. “We have not looked at that specific area,” she said in the nearly five-and- a-half minute clip. The Fed has refused to identify the borrowers, loan amounts or specific assets submitted as collateral under 11 of the central bank’s programs. Officials have argued that doing so might set off a run by depositors and unsettle shareholders.

Disclosure Lawsuit

Bloomberg LP, sued in November, 2008 under the Freedom of Information Act on behalf of its Bloomberg News unit to get access to information about the FED loans.

“What have you done to investigate the off-balance-sheet transactions conducted by the Federal Reserve which, according to Bloomberg, now total $9 trillion in the last 8 months?” Grayson asked Coleman.

Coleman, who was appointed to the position in May 2007, said in the hearing that she hadn’t seen the article.

A Bloomberg News story published Feb. 9 said the Treasury Department, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and Fed have lent or spent almost $3 trillion over the past two years and pledged up to $5.7 trillion more. A March 31 article raised the total amount committed or disbursed to $12.8 trillion.

A statement e-mailed by Coleman’s office yesterday said the Fed board’s inspector general doesn’t have legal authority to investigate the transactions that have swelled the central bank’s balance sheet.

“By law, we are the Office of Inspector General for the Board of Governors only,” the statement said. “Consistent with our authority, we cannot conduct a direct audit of Reserve Bank operations.”

The video, which was linked on the Huffington Post Web site, “makes it perfectly clear that if the inspector general herself doesn’t know what’s happened to that money then we’re going to have to find out ourselves,” Grayson said in an interview yesterday.

To contact the reporter on this story: Timothy R. Homan in Washington at thoman1@bloomberg.net

my comment: The inter-relational structure of the Fed and the OIG are purposely contrived to insure impotence and obscure transparency of the ongoing fraud and collusion between so called “government regulators” and the privately owned US central bank. The Fed is part of a financial cartel of global central banks set up to manipulate the currencies and control the economies of sovereign nations, while preserving the (somewhat thinly veiled) illusion that governments have any control over their economies at all. The Fed bailout of the international global Oligarchy in collusion with conspiring “regulators” (Summers, Paulson, Geithner, Rubin, etc…) who have been groomed by the cartel and placed in key government positions is the most outrageous global swindle of the public ever commited in the history of our declining civilization — History in the making; too bad our grandchildren are destined to scrawl chalk-drawings of cockroaches in hovels instead of reading about it.

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