From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.

And I'm Brooke Gladstone. This week on Bloomberg.com, some blockbuster revelations.

For the past three years, Bloomberg News has been battling the Federal Reserve in court

to find out crucial details about the Fed's lending during the financial crisis.

Though the Fed did regularly release aggregates of overall lending, it didn't disclose which

institutions were borrowing or how much. Bloomberg finally won that case, and now we do know

which institutions the Fed promised $7.77 trillion to, apparently

with no strings attached, and in fact earned some $13 billion on the deal thanks to the low

interest rates. Bloomberg News, Bob Ivory, is the first to say that Ben Bernanke's Fed is a more transparent Fed,

but there's a difference between transparency and disclosure.

True, the 2010 Dodd-Frank bill now sets a two-year limit on how long the Fed can hide these details,

but when lawmakers were discussing regulating the banks during the last

crisis, they were almost entirely in the dark. None of the senators or Congress members that we

spoke to knew any of the details. So when we told them, for instance, that Morgan Stanley had borrowed

$107 billion on a single day in 2008, or that Bank of America had borrowed

$99 billion on a single day, or Citigroup had borrowed more than $90 billion. They were just as

shocked as everybody else was. Legislators misunderstood the depth of the problem and so didn't find the courage to actually deal with it.

Now, I mean, it seems to me that that's the most serious fallout from the secrecy.

What the Fed secrecy did was it allowed the biggest banks to get even bigger.

One of our sources was former Senator Ted Kaufman of Delaware.

He really pushed for legislation, along with Sherrod Brown, the senator from Ohio.

The two of them, it was called the Brown-Coffman Amendment, and it would limit the size of financial institutions.

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