ledeagenda.com

From Bloomberg:

The Federal Reserve filed a notice it will appeal a judge’s order requiring the central bank to identify the companies that benefited from its emergency loans.

The filing with the U.S. Court of Appeals in New York today was authorized by Solicitor General Elena Kagan, the Obama administration’s top courtroom lawyer, according to Charles Miller, a spokesman for Kagan.

“Public disclosure is likely to cause substantial competitive injury to these financial institutions including the loss of public confidence in the institution, runs on banks and possible failure of some institutions,” the Fed said in its notice, which asks to put the lower court’s order on hold until the appeal is prepared.

Bloomberg LP, the New York-based company majority-owned by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, sued the Fed on Nov. 7 on behalf of its Bloomberg News unit, demanding details about the Fed borrowers and the collateral they put up. That information is “central to understanding and assessing the government’s response to the most cataclysmic financial crisis in America since the Great Depression,” Bloomberg said in the suit.

“One way or the other, the Fed is going to have to come clean,” Representative Alan Grayson, a Florida Democrat, said today in a statement delivered through his spokesman, Matt Stoller. Grayson helps oversee bailout programs as a member of the U.S. House Financial Services Committee.

Extending Credit

“There is not a single American who does not have a stake in how the Federal Reserve and other major banks operate,” Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Arlington, Virginia-based Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said an interview. “To deny American taxpayers simple information about how their money was used and by whom is inexcusable.”

Manhattan Chief U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska had set today as the deadline for the appeal of her Aug. 24 ruling ordering the Fed to disclose information. Fed lawyer Kit Wheatley asked Preska on Aug. 27 to halt enforcement of the order to give the central bank time to get Kagan’s consent.