War On You: Breaking Alternative News

Source: Global Research – Bob Chapman

This past week the BLS released the September unemployment statistics and they worsened as usual, as America enjoys its recovery.

U-1–Those unemployed 15 weeks or longer, as a percent of the civilian labor force was 5.4%.

U-2-Job losers and persons who completed temporary jobs, as a percent of the labor force was 6.8%.

U-3-Total unemployed, as a percentage of the civilian labor force, the official unemployment rate, 9.8%.

U-4-Discouraged workers 10.2%.

U-5-Total unemployed plus discharged workers, plus marginally attached workers 11.1%.

U-6-Total unemployed as a percent of the civilian labor force 17%.

If the birth/death ratio is removed, U-6 is in reality 21.3% total US unemployment. The estimate is that 824,000, more jobs may be extracted from the payroll count for the 12-months ended next March. Such a revision would be the biggest since 1991. The BLS is underestimating job losses deliberately and has been for a long time. That would mean September’s loss would be some 300,000 not 263,000.

Such a revision would put job losses not at 4.8 million but 5.6 million jobs.

This is how government has operated for some time and will continue to as long as we allow them too.

Last week the Dow and the S&P fell 1.8%; the Russell 2,000 fell 3.1% and the Nasdaq 100 fell 1.9%. Cyclicals fell 2.5%; transports 3%; banks 2.8%, as broker/dealers gained 1.1%. Consumers rose 0.3%; utilities fell 2.69%; high techs fell 1.6%; semis 4.5%; Internets fell 1.6% and biotechs 4.1%. Gold bullion rose $12.00, as the HUI dipped 0.7%. The USDX rose 0.3% to 77.03.

Two-year T-bills fell 11 bps to 0.76%, 10-year notes fell 10 bps to 3.22% and 10-year German bunds fell 13 bps to 3.12%.

Freddie Mac 30-year fixed rate mortgage rates fell 10 bps to an 18-week low of 4.94%; 15’s fell 10 bps to 4.36% and one-year ARMs fell 3 bps to 4.49%. Jumbo 30’s fell 6 bps to 6.11%.

Federal Reserve credit fell $12.4 billion. It has fallen $126 billion ytd, but it is still up $742 billion, or 53% yoy. Fed foreign holdings of Treasuries and Agency debt rose $583 million to a record $2.855 trillion. Custody holdings for foreign central banks rose at a 17.9% rate ytd, and $389 billion yoy, or 15.8%.

M2 narrow money supply declined $8 billion to $8.310 trillion ytd and 5.2% yoy.

As the lack of government guarantees become known more money leaves money market funds. Assets sank again $53.5 billion to $3.429 trillion. They have fallen $401 billion ytd, or 36% annualized. They have increased only $30 billion, or 0.9% yoy.

We wonder what House and Senate members think when their constituents complain that banks are now charging 25% to 40% credit card interest? They simply don’t care, because these very same banks are paying off these elected representatives and senators via campaign contributions. That is an extra $700 billion to $1 trillion a year in earnings when the average family is having trouble putting food on the table. Couple this with virtually no income on savings and you have a dreadful situation. Americans are tax slaves to government and debt slaves to banks, a situation that cannot long persist. In addition banks want to charge more and subtly taxes will soon rise again.

Last week we forecast the fall in the Dow at 9,800 and so it has begun. The market has finally overpowered the manipulation of our government. It wasn’t that difficult. A 26 P/E ratio of trailing earnings that should be 14.5 times. The next leg down will test 6,000 to 6,600 on the Dow next year. All those who had a second chance to sell into the bear market will be doomed to greater losses than they experienced this year. It is time to again exit the market and move into gold and silver related assets. The banks and brokerage firms along with insurance companies have been driving this bear market with money from the Fed and the Treasury at 50 times leverage. The correction is underway as all these entities try to exit at the same time. Some are going to end up insolvent. This reminds us of 1922 in Germany and today’s Zimbabwe. Assets on bank and brokerage house balance sheets are going to be devastated. Even they do not really understand the debasement that has taken place.  Every chart comparing everything with gold is in a state of collapse and that will become more evident shortly as gold soars to new heights. The mad overvaluation of the markets is about to end. The de-leveraging will take ten perhaps 20 years that is unless we have another world war. Fudging the figures just is not going to work. The PPI is climbing and no one seems to notice, particularly the media. Big inflation is on the way. It will be interesting to see just how much of the price increases businesses are going to absorb. Those on the edge are going to go bankrupt as debt doubles and doubles again.

All this is the result of the machinations of Illuminists who have created a corporatist fascist government for us, which will become the new world order, if we allow it to happen.

How can it be possible to have an economic recovery as we lose more and more jobs and that America manufactures very little. Private banks, Wall Street and insurance companies with vast amounts of wealth control our country, make no mistake about it. This is done by the private issuance of money and the deliberate creation of inflation, deflation and depression.

Inflation started to show up again beginning in May and this past month showed 25% growth in the PPI. That won’t show up in official government figures for the CPI, but it will in part be there. Will the corporations absorb the added cost or will they pass it on? Of course, they’ll pass it on.

Relentlessly the dollar is being abandoned worldwide. Unfortunately, the other G-20 currencies are not much better and that is why gold is so important. Keeping liquidity running into the system hasn’t worked and can’t work.

Our President’s pet group ACORN, a criminal enterprise, has had its funding pulled by the Ford Foundation. Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, the Marguerite Casey Foundation and Bank of America. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

The dollar has fallen from $124.00 on the USDX in 2002 to about 76.30 recently and was as low as 75.75 two weeks ago. Incidentally, someone should tell the liars at CNBC gold has risen by 300%. At both G-20 and G-7 summits there was little attention afforded to the plight and future of the dollar.

G-20 was full of the normal gobbligoop by bureaucrats running hither and yon, and accomplishing nothing more than creating a cloud of dust. They said they will maintain the global flow of capital as bank lending fell 14% yoy. Nothing has been done to repair the financial system. It is worse off now than it has been in two years, since the debacle began. In order to repair the system it has to be purged. The banks, brokerage houses, insurance companies and the Fed have to go into bankruptcy. This, of course, means Americans will lose 50% to 95% of their wealth, unless they are in gold and silver related assets. That is the cost of not paying attention, for not making the House, Senate and President do as they should. These so-called leaders have done everything possible to insure that there is no recovery. This while they tell us the global financial crisis is over. In addition the same crowd that created this disaster tells us over and over again that without their untimely and unprecedented support, the system would have collapsed.

You have to laugh at the G-7 and G-20. The latest is that world financial ministers have told the IMF to prepare guidelines to ensure an orderly and cooperative exit from fiscal and monetary stimulus. That can’t happen, because if it does the whole system will collapse. This is the IMF, which is selling gold because they will soon be broke, and haven’t made a correct decision in 60 years. The IMF is to provide insurance-style finance to well run emerging economies so they won’t build up foreign exchange. We have never heard anything stupider in our lives. As this transpired the World Bank’s President, Robert Zoellick, informs us the bank will be broke within a year.

Last month the BLS created 34,000 jobs via the net birth/debt adjustment (ratio). What a fraud. That is double the 18,000 for September 2008.

They are telling you what you are supposed to believe. That story is as believable as the WDO story that started the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Our President tells us Iran has a secret nuclear facility. This is information Iran told the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency four days previously and miraculously our President discovered it. This, like the meetings of G-20, G-7 and demonstrations, serve as distractions to our pitiful economic and financial morass. This was to be used as an excuse to greatly increase sanctions, which are a form of warfare. All this is misinformation to cover up a two-year old credit crisis that is worsening by the day. Americans and others realize this. That is why spending is falling and savings are rising. This holiday season sales will be off 1% to 3% with the stimulus package. Otherwise they would have been off 5% or more. Recognition of our financial and economic situation has made banks reduce lending. It is obvious credit expansion has reached its limit and that is why lending and spending has slowed.

This all comes back to 8/15/71, the day the US left the gold standard. The only way the dollar can be saved is by a return to the gold standard. Unfortunately that won’t and can’t happen because we do not believe the US has any gold left and even if they did they still wouldn’t have a gold backed currency. They want the destruction of the dollar in order to implement a world currency from the IMF and in that process bring the world economic and financial system to its knees to force us to accept World Government. This is evident in the Illuminist goal to control all political, social and financial freedom. This is all being done by way of deception. The same deceit has been used in the TARP program. The purpose of which was to purchase troubled assets that cluttered balance sheets. What happened instead was that the funds were used to buy the shares of troubled banks and for banks to buy other failing banks and to speculate in markets. Another deception is that the Fed will wind down its monetization program. That is impossible, otherwise the system would collapse.  Never mind the secret monetization going on in swaps and in secret Cayman accounts. In all of this saving of banks, Wall Street and insurance companies the public has been left behind and unemployment has flourished. All such programs are doomed to failure and your only protection is gold and silver related assets.

Goldman Sachs stands to receive a payment of $1bn – while US taxpayers would lose $2.3bn – if embattled commercial lender CIT files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, people familiar with the matter said.

The payment stems from the structure of a $3bn rescue finance package that Goldman extended to CIT on June 6 2008, about five months before the Treasury bought $2.3bn in CIT preferred shares to prop it up at the height of the crisis. The potential loss for taxpayers would be the biggest to crystallize so far from the government’s capital injection plan for banks.

The agreement with Goldman states that if CIT defaults or goes bankrupt, it would be required to pay a make-whole amount that totals $1bn, the people familiar with the matter said.

While Goldman is entitled to demand the full amount, it is likely to agree to postpone payment on a part of that sum, these people added. A CIT filing last week said that it was in negotiations with Goldman concerning an amendment to this facility.

Goldman said: This would not be a windfall payment. The make-whole payment is simply the present value of the spread to be earned over the life of the facility.

CIT declined to comment. In an effort to prevent bankruptcy, it is working on a debt exchange offer that would virtually wipe out equity holders. In the event of bankruptcy, Goldman would reap more than $1bn because it also holds credit insurance that would be paid off.

Goldman said: “The credit default swaps Goldman Sachs purchased to prudently manage the risk associated with the CIT financing are not a directional ‘bet’ on CIT, but were bought to protect against the possibility of a precipitous decline in the value of the collateral.”

Michael Geoghegan, chief executive of HSBC, is so convinced there will be a second downturn in the coming months that he plans to delay any rush to expand the bank.
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US vacation timeshare sales may fall the most this year since the industry gained popularity in the 1970s. Sales may drop 30% this year from 2008, said Howard Nusbaum, president and chief executive officer of the American Resort Development Association.

Applications for Social Security benefits rose almost 50% more than expected this year because of the recession, according to the federal retirement program.  ‘We are seeing a significant increase in both retirement and disability applications as a result of the recession,’ said Mark Lassiter, a Social Security spokesman. Agency statistics show that 2.57 million people requested benefits, up from the 2.10 million applications received during the previous 12 months.

State tax revenues in the second quarter plunged 17% from a year earlier as rising unemployment and reduced spending hurt sales- and income-tax collections. The decline was the sharpest since at least the 1960s. The biggest drop among major revenue sources was in state income taxes, which were down 28% from a year ago. Sales-tax revenues fell 9%.

Connecticut, the state with the most tax-supported debt, will borrow $2.25 billion over the next two years to balance its budget amid plunging income tax collections. [Let’s not forget they loaned $1 billion to the Hartford Insurance Group, which they‘ll probably never see again.]

Manhattan apartment prices fell for a second consecutive quarter, helping drive the biggest gain in sales in more than 13 years. The median price slid 8.4% to $850,000 in the third quarter from a year earlier, appraiser Miller Samuel Inc. and broker Prudential Douglas Elliman Real Estate said. The number of sales jumped 46% from the second quarter.

Manhattan office rents fell 5.2% in the third quarter from the previous three months. Asking rents fell to an average of $50.98 a square foot from $53.76 broker Studley Inc. said. Rents for the best offices in Manhattan declined 6.4% to $62.38 a square foot in the period.

The U.S. Supreme Court rejected an appeal by Joseph Nacchio, the former Qwest Communications International Inc. chief executive officer convicted of selling $52 million in company stock based on inside information.

The justices, without comment, let stand a federal appeals court decision that upheld Nacchio’s conviction. His lawyers contended that Nacchio didn’t withhold any material information from the public about the company’s condition and that an expert witness was improperly barred from testifying at his trial.

“I am deeply disappointed by the court’s decision because I am convinced that he is innocent and did not receive a fair trial,” Nacchio’s lead Supreme Court lawyer, Maureen Mahoney, said in an e-mail.

Nacchio began serving what initially was a six-year sentence in April. An appeals court later ordered a trial judge to reconsider the prison term, saying the original sentence was based on a miscalculation of how much Nacchio gained from his illicit conduct.

Nacchio, 60, separately is seeking a new trial, arguing before a federal district judge in Denver that new evidence shows prosecutors mischaracterized the testimony of the company’s former chief financial officer.

Prosecutors said Nacchio should have disclosed in 2001 that Qwest’s recurring revenue was falling short and that the company was relying too heavily on the shrinking market for one-time sales of its network capacity. He was accused of accelerating his stock sales upon learning in April 2001 that Qwest missed its first-quarter forecasts for recurring revenue. [More then 600 other corporate officers did the same thing and not one was prosecuted because they made a deal with the Justice Department for their firms to accept fines on their behalf. Nacchio was not an Illuminists nor was he connected to their structure, so he goes to jail and no one else does, as an example, that you either cooperate or we destroy you.]

U.S. service industries expanded in September for the first time in a year as the emerging recovery spread from housing and factories to the broader economy.

The Institute for Supply Management’s index of non- manufacturing businesses, which make up almost 90 percent of the economy, rose to 50.9, higher than forecast, from 48.4 in August, according to the Tempe, Arizona-based group. Fifty is the dividing line between expansion and contraction.

New York University Professor Nouriel Roubini said stock markets may drop and billionaire George Soros warned the “bankrupt” U.S. banking system will hamper its economy, highlighting doubts about the sustainability of the global recovery.

“Markets have gone up too much, too soon, too fast,” Roubini, who accurately predicted the financial crisis, said in an interview in Istanbul on Oct. 3. U.S. stocks may suffer a “major decline” after climbing to the highest levels in almost a year two weeks ago,

U.S. consumers are “over-debted” and the country’s banking system has been “basically bankrupt,” Soros said in Istanbul today. “The United States has a long way to go.”

A measure of U.S. job prospects rose in September for the first time in more than a year, a sign job losses may not keep accelerating, a private survey showed.

The Conference Board’s Employment Trends Index rose 0.3 to 88.5, the first increase since January 2008 and the highest level since April, the New York-based private research group said today. The reading was down 16 percent from a year ago.

A government report last week showed payrolls in September fell more than forecast, a sign the economic recovery may be slow to gain speed. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke last week said joblessness would remain above 9 percent through next year, indicating the central bank wouldn’t move quickly to drain cash from the economy.

The index “suggests that the trend of declining job losses will continue,” Gad Levanon, a senior economist at the Conference Board, said in a statement. “But the road to recovery is definitely going to be bumpy and may last unusually long, given the depth of the recession we have experienced.”

Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman Sheila Bair said regulators should consider making secured creditors carry more of the cost of bank failures.

“This could involve potentially limiting their claims to no more than, say, 80 percent of their secured credits,” Bair said yesterday in a speech to a banking conference in Istanbul. “This would ensure that market participants always have some skin in the game, and it would be very strong medicine indeed.”

Bair’s comments go beyond any of her previous proposals for changing the way large and so-called systemically important financial institutions are regulated. She has long supported broadening the government’s powers in order to limit the impact on the financial system of an event such as last year’s bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.

The proposal would probably increase banks’ cost of funding and make it harder to find long-term financing because creditors would be watching closely for any signs of trouble, said William Black, associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and a former bank regulator.

“It would make it gratuitously more expensive for banks to raise funds, even on a secured basis,” Black said.

Bair’s proposals, which would require legislation, aren’t part of the U.S. regulatory overhaul. The Obama administration has defended making auto industry bondholders accept losses as a condition of a government bailout, while saying the same approach shouldn’t apply to banks because of the havoc such changes may wreak on the financial system.

Financial markets should be subject to new taxes that will discourage “dysfunctional” trading and help pay for the damage the global crisis inflicted on poorer countries, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz said.

“The financial sector polluted the global economy with toxic assets and now they ought to clean out,” Stiglitz told reporters today in Istanbul, where he’s attending the International Monetary Fund and World Bank annual meetings. He said a tax is “much more feasible today” than in the past.

The IMF will study ways to tax the financial industry at the request of Group of 20 leaders, Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn said last week. He dismissed the “very simplistic” idea of the so-called Tobin tax, a global charge on currency trades, which he said would be difficult to implement.

Stiglitz said any new levy should cover all asset classes, and will be easier to implement as more of the world’s financial transactions are brought under regulatory control.

Charges on contracts such as derivatives should be based on the gross value of the assets, to “discourage the kind of hidden leverage that helped cause this crisis” and rein in the “destructive innovation” of bankers, he said.

Money raised by the tax could be used to help poor countries who weren’t responsible for the financial crisis and are nevertheless suffering its consequences, Stiglitz said. The $700 billion offered by the U.S. government a year ago to bail out banks was equivalent to a decade’s-worth of all global aid to poor nations, he said.

The dollar fell after Group of Seven finance ministers omitted any mention of the currency’s weakness in their final communique. European stocks and U.S. index futures gained.

The U.S. currency declined against 13 of its 16 most-traded peers as of 12:17 p.m. in New York. The yen slipped versus all 16 after Finance Minister Hirohisa Fujii said the government will act if the foreign-exchange market moves in a “biased direction.” The Dow Jones Stoxx 600 Index of European shares rose for the first time in four days, adding 0.4 percent. Futures on the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index increased 0.6 percent.

Finance ministers and central bankers from the G-7 nations avoided any reference to the American currency’s decline, which sent the Dollar Index down 5 percent this year, after their Oct. 3 talks in Istanbul. Europe’s manufacturing and services industries expanded more than initially estimated in September, London-based Markit Economics said. In the U.S., service industries probably snapped 11 straight declines, a separate monthly report may show.

“A weaker dollar helps with the goal of global rebalancing, which appears to be a larger aim of the G-7,” Sophia Drossos, head of currency strategy at Morgan Stanley in New York and a former foreign-exchange manager at the Federal Reserve, wrote in a report today. This “reinforces our view that as long as a weak dollar is largely reflective of rate and growth differentials, the G-7 is unlikely to stand in the way.”

White House officials and Democratic leaders in Congress on Friday said they were weighing extending key elements of the economic-stimulus program as the nation grapples with a deteriorating job market. Obama administration economists said they would like the enhanced unemployment-insurance program to extend beyond its Dec. 31 expiration date. They also want to maintain a program that offers tax credits to pay 65% of the cost of health insurance policies under the COBRA program, which allows laid-off workers to purchase the health plans they had through their previous employer.

White House officials said they also are examining whether to extend a soon-to-expire tax credit for first-time homebuyers, but that provision faces a stiffer headwind. [This is exactly as we predicted in January.]

The details of the September Employment Report are uglier than the headline NFP number. U6 (comprehensive unemployment) is now 17%. The average workweek declined to 30.0 hours from 30.1;and the household survey showed a stunning 785k drop in employment. John Williams calculates total unemployment, adding people that have not looked for work for over one year to U6, at 21.4%.

The average amount of time it takes fired employees to find a new job exceeds the length of their standard unemployment benefits…the average duration of unemployment is now 26.2 weeks, longer than the 26 weeks of state benefits normally provided to workers who lose their jobs. It’s the first time that has occurred since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began keeping records in 1948.

Congress has extended unemployment benefits twice — first in July 2008 and then as part of the stimulus bill signed in February. Currently, the unemployed are eligible for a total of 46 weeks of benefits, and those in states where the unemployment rate is more than 6 percent are eligible for 59 weeks.

America’s army of long-term unemployed — those without work for six months or more – has swelled to 5.4 million.

The figures raise the possibility that the government’s calculations continue to miss the mark. “We are probably still underestimating job losses,” said John Silvia, chief economist at Wells Fargo Securities. Once a year, the Labor Department revises its payroll figures after combing through tax records from the unemployment insurance program that covers practically all businesses. Those records are only available after a lag, explaining why it takes more than a year to make the tabulations. The department uses a formula, known as the birth/death model, to determine the influence on payrolls from the formation and demise of businesses. Because the government doesn’t know if a company fails to respond because it has gone out of business or is just late, it estimates the number of companies that may have folded. By the same token, it plugs in an estimate for the formation of new businesses to account for their hiring.

“This birth/death model is still assuming that we are getting new jobs from new-business creations,” David Rosenberg, chief economist at Gluskin Sheff & Associates Inc. in Toronto, said in an interview. “These additions are coming somewhere from ‘Alice in Wonderland,” he said.

Consumer bankruptcies soared 41 percent in September from a year before and climbed from August, as high unemployment and the housing market crash took their toll, the American Bankruptcy Institute said on Friday. http://www.reuters.com/article/ousivMolt/idUSTRE5915HC20091002

You can’t make up stuff like this! Reuters: Greenspan says Fed balance sheet an inflation risk “You cannot afford to get behind the curve on reining in this extraordinary amount of liquidity because that will create an enormous inflation down the road,” Greenspan said at a forum hosted by The Atlantic magazine, the Aspen Institute and the Newseum.

The number of U.S. lenders that can’t collect on at least 20 percent of their loans hit an 18-year high, signaling that more bank failures and losses could slow an economic recovery.

Are perceptions of the bailout still negative, or are folks not as upset as they were a year ago?

Poole: It’s clear that the general public is disgusted with the bailout. The general public understands that it’s a grossly unfair and unreasonable situation for risks to be socialized and gains to be private. That’s just common sense. What everybody seems to be hoping is that banks have learned a lesson, and I’m sure banks are going to be much more conservative.

But the same incentives for leverage are there that were there two years ago and three years ago that created this problem. In due time, some traders will be instructed to take those leveraged risks that come out with big profits, and it’s going to be hard for others not to join in. It’s going to be very hard for the Federal Reserve and others to stop them.

Using data from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Mr. Baker’s study found that the spread between the average cost at smaller banks and at larger institutions widened significantly after March 2008, when the United States government brokered the Bear Stearns rescue. From the beginning of 2000 through the fourth quarter of 2007, the cost of funds for small institutions averaged 0.29 percentage point more than that of banks with $100 billion or more in assets. But from late 2008 through June 2009, when bailouts for large institutions became expected, this spread widened to an average of 0.78 percentage point.

At that level, Mr. Baker calculated, the total taxpayer subsidy for the 18 large bank holding companies was $34.1 billion a year…Mr. Baker says it is important to continue measuring this difference in costs to see whether the subsidy disappears or whether it is a continuing transfer of income.

So far this year, nearly all of the earnings improvements have been achieved through major cost-cutting efforts. Overall selling and administrative costs among S.& P. 500 companies fell 5.7 percent in the second quarter versus the period a year earlier, according to a recent report by David J. Kostin, the chief United States equity strategist at Goldman Sachs.

This represents far more drastic cuts than were undertaken in the recessions of 1991 and 2001. Still, “you can only cut so much,” said Howard Silverblatt, senior index analyst at S& P. “At some point, you need to start seeing the business actually grow. You need to see increased sales” — sometimes called “top line” growth. That’s why Mr. Silverblatt says that revenue — not earnings — “will be the most important number for investors to watch.” The revenue declines are even more staggering on a dollar basis. From June 2008 to June 2009, revenue of the 500 companies tumbled by a total of $1.15 trillion. “That’s more than the entire fiscal stimulus,” Mr. Silverblatt said.

For nearly two years, economic issues have held the top spot in terms of importance among voters.

But the latest national telephone survey shows that 83% now view government ethics and corruption as very important, placing it just ahead of the economy on a list of 10 key electoral issues regularly tracked by Rasmussen Reports. Eighty-two percent (82%) of voters see the economy as very important.

This is the first time since October 2007 that voters have rated ethics and corruption as more important than the economy. Voters viewed the two issues evenly in November and December 2007 before placing a higher priority on the economy starting in January 2008.

Last month, 86% of voters said economic issues were very important while 80% saw government ethics that way.

The new findings come at a time when 43% of voters say the president is doing a poor job addressing government ethics and reducing corruption, up five points from early September and the highest level measured since he took office. Forty percent (40%) now give the president good or excellent ratings on his handling of the issue.

The Federal Reserve should be forced to identify companies that received loans from the central bank because it can’t demonstrate that borrowers would be harmed by the disclosure, according to lawyers who won a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

The details sought by the Bloomberg News unit of Bloomberg LP, the New York-based company majority-owned by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, aren’t proprietary, attorneys for the company said today in a court document opposing the Fed’s request for a court to halt disclosure of information while an appeal proceeds.

Bloomberg won a ruling from Manhattan’s chief federal judge on Aug. 24 affirming the right of U.S. taxpayers to know about the financial firms that borrowed money. Total lending by the Fed, which last year began extending credit directly to companies that aren’t banks for the first time since it was created in 1913, was $2.12 trillion on Sept. 30.

Divulging specifics about the loan program might touch off a run by depositors, unsettle shareholders and hurt the central bank’s “ability to perform important statutory functions at a time of economic upheaval,” Fed lawyers have said in legal filings.

Growing speculation over the potential end to dollar-based trading in the oil market may be part of the reason gold prices have rallied beyond $1,020 an ounce to stand near their highest level in 18 months.