"Transparency" Watch

As part of a campaign to fend off an urgently-needed audit, Ben Bernanke and his colleagues protest that the Fed is already the most open and communicative central bank in the world. To bolster the case, Bernanke has pointed to the policy of releasing verbatim transcripts of FOMC meetings. These transcripts are supposed to be made public with a five-year lag. From the Fed's website:

Are minutes and transcripts of FOMC meetings available? Yes, minutes of regularly scheduled meetings are released to the public three weeks after the date of the policy decision. Transcripts of meetings for an entire year are released to the public with a five-year lag.

The link to access the transcripts is here. The most recent transcripts available are from 2003. Since it's now late March 2010, the transcripts for 2004 should have been released months ago. The public hasn't seen a single transcript of an FOMC meeting that has taken place in the last six-plus years.

Maybe the delay is understandable. The 2003 transcripts contain damning evidence of Bernanke's broad-stroke policy incompetence and his complicity in the bubble, which I wrote about in this article for The American Conservative. Since 2004 was an important bubble-related year, those transcripts should also yield some telling nuggets -- assuming some trusty Fed editor hasn't been making them more "readable" for public consumption.