Fed Publishes Transcripts of 2008 Meetings

WASHINGTON - The Federal Reserve on Friday published hundreds of pages of transcripts from some of its crucial policy meetings during the crisis year of 2008.

The Fed battled a deepening recession during the course of that year by cutting short-term interest rates nearly to zero for the first time since the Great Depression, and pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into the global financial system.

The 14 transcripts the Fed published Friday were from eight scheduled meetings and six emergency meetings of the Federal Open Market Committee, which sets the Fed's monetary policy, including the level of short-term rates. The transcripts will not include other meetings at which smaller groups of Fed officials, working with the Treasury Department, plotted the bailouts of Bear Stearns, the American International Group, and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac - and reached the fateful conclusion that Lehman Brothers could not be saved.

Dennis Lockhart, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, said this week that the Fed's initial response to the financial crisis may have been too slow, but that the transcripts would show the Fed had then responded forcefully.

'I think when you read those transcripts, you'll get a sense of how we were thinking about the financial sector and its stress and its problems, as well as how that was influencing and spilling over into the economy,' Mr. Lockhart told reporters.

But inevitably, questions have persisted about whether the Fed could have done more to prevent the collapse of the financial system during 2008, and also whether it could have acted more forcefully to revive the economy.

James Bullard, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, said in a November speech that the Fed's decision to cut interest rates in the early months of 2008 actually deepened the crisis. Others have argued the Fed should have let Bear Stearns fail, or that it should have found a way to rescue Lehman Brothers.

The transcripts are unlikely to resolve these debates, but they do offer a more complete understanding of the factors that guided the Fed's decisions.

The Fed has generally released an annual batch of transcripts in January after a five-year delay, a policy it adopted in the mid-1990s. It has not explained why the widely anticipated release of the 2008 transcripts was postponed until February. A Fed spokeswoman said Friday that there was no regular release date and noted that the date has varied in past years.

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