Geithner has already made his own views clear. In testimony before the Senate Agricultural Committee in December 2009, he
declared that the foreign-exchange market needed no special regulation. "The FX [foreign exchange] markets are different," he said. "They are not really derivative in a sense, and they don't present the same sort of risk, and there is an elaborate framework in place already to limit settlement risk."
Geithner added, "These markets actually work quite well. We have a basic obligation to do no harm, to make sure that as we reform, we don't make things worse and our judgment is because of the protection that already exists in these foreign-exchange markets and because they are different from derivatives, have different risks and require different solutions, they require a different approach." This week, Treasury spokesperson Steve Adamske told me that Geithner stands by those views.
However, previously confidential information recently made public by the Federal Reserve Board reveals that in the aftermath of the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, the Fed pumped in $5.4 trillion over a three-month period to keep the foreign-currency market from collapsing. The Fed's peak injection of dollars on any one day occurred on Oct. 22, 2008, when it reached $823 billion, according to a Wall Street watchdog group's, Better Markets, analysis of the Fed data release.
The extent of the massive intervention by the Federal Reserve is now public information only because the Sanders Amendment to Dodd-Frank, which passed the Senate 96-0 in 2010, required the Fed to disclose more details of its financial operations. The extent of the intervention is buried in a massive data dump released by the Fed last December and was recently analyzed by Better Markets. This finding was contained in a letter sent by Better Markets President Dennis Kelleher to Geithner on Feb. 25. In his letter, Kelleher
wrote, "The data refute the claim that the foreign-exchange markets performed well during the financial crisis and thus should be exempt from regulation."