Transparency Schmancparency: Bailout Payment Details Blacked Out

from the this-will-end-badly dept

With the financial bailout process under way, our main fear was that the government would royally screw up, often by handing out favors to friends, rather than focusing on what actually needs to be done to get the economy moving in the right direction. To counter that possibility, one thing you heard repeatedly was that there would be unprecedented "transparency" in how the government conducted this. Transparency here is important. In fact, a big part of the reason we're in this mess in the first place was that banks consistently obfuscated the details of various deals, in order to hide the risk levels. That caused banks and others to buy hugely risky assets, believing they weren't that risky. So, is the government really being transparent?

Of course not.

The folks over at Planet Money note that the first contract awarded under the bailout, with Bank of New York Mellon Corp. just so happens to have the compensation details to Bank of New York Mellon redacted. If anyone is going to trust the government in handling the $700 billion, how much it spends and how it compensates the various banks that take part in the process clearly need to be open. Otherwise this is a huge opportunity for cronyism and corruption. To start out by blacking out the compensation details is quite troubling, and it doesn't exactly bode well for how transparent the rest of this process is going to be.

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