Transcripts from 2005 to the present are not yet public because federal policy keeps them secret for five years before releasing them in one year bundles
When the housing bubble was first becoming apparent to the government, the then-Chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan wanted to keep monetary concerns a secret, the Huffington Post reports.
New transcripts released of the minutes of 2004’s Federal Open Market Committee meetings show Greenspan’s hesitation to have federal transparency came down to thinking that the federal officials involved knew better than the American public.
Former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan doesn't want you to know what the Federal Reserve is really up to
“We run the risk, by laying out the pros and cons of a particular argument, of inducing people to join in on the debate, and in this regard it is possible to lose control of a process that only we fully understand,” Greenspan said in March 2004.
At another point during that meeting, Jack Guynn, a Federal Reserve bank president from Atlanta, expressed his worries about the market.
“The substantial run-up in house prices, which we have followed in Florida and also see in the populous Northeast and West Coast of the United States, may be at least partially attributable to unusually low mortgage rates influenced by our very accommodative policy,” Guynn said.
Still, despite his warnings and the potential impact housing market could have on the economy, the federal minutes of the meeting neglected to mention them.
“Reports from some contacts suggested that speculative forces might be boosting housing demand in some parts of the country, with concomitant effects on prices, suggesting the possibility that house prices might be moving into the high end of the range that could be consistent with fundamentals,” the minutes read.
Transcripts from 2005 to the present are not yet public because federal policy keeps them secret for five years before releasing them in one year bundles. As a result, those from early 2005 will not be available until end of 2010, when December’s have reached five year maturity.