From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media.

I'm Bob Garfield.

Okay, here's the deal.

Brooke Gladstone took a bit sick this week after she finished her interviews, but before she

recorded her introduction, so I'll handle that for her.

Just imagine me as a stunning brunette. And here we go. So, it turns out that the

$700 billion congressional bank bailout that made headlines back in September doesn't begin to

encompass the amount of taxpayer money the Federal Reserve has really been loaning to banks.

See, there's this other $2 trillion.

That's what Bloomberg News reported this week.

But we don't know much about those deals, and we're supposed to.

After all, here's Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson back in September.

We need oversight.

We need protection.

We need transparency. I want protection. We need transparency.

I want it.

We all want it.

But apparently the Fed doesn't want it, fearing, we suppose, that if we were aware of which

banks were getting the money or what they were putting up as collateral for it, we would

get nervous about them.

On Wednesday, at least five Republican members of Congress called for the Fed to disclose

which financial institutions are borrowing taxpayer money and what troubled assets the Fed is accepting as collateral.

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