It's old news now: yesterday, President-elect Barack Obama announced he was picking Timothy Geithner, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, as his Treasury Secretary.

Geithner's New York Fed, according to Bloomberg.com, has been "accepting [securities from banks] on behalf of American taxpayers as collateral for $1.5 trillion of loans. (Bear in mind that link is several weeks old, and, due to rounding and additional bailouts, may be off by a trillion dollars or two).

Bloomberg filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act for documents related to that $1.5 trillion ...