Fed staff review downplays 2012 leak from policy meeting – Reuters

The United States Federal Reserve Board building is shown in Washington October 28, 2014.

Credit: Reuters/Gary Cameron

(Reuters) – The leak of information from a closed Federal Reserve policy meeting in 2012 was the result of “unintentional or careless” contact between Fed officials and a journalist and analyst firm, a Fed staff review of the incident concluded two years ago.

The U.S. central bank on Monday released a summary of the staff report in response to recent queries by both Democratic and Republican members of Congress. The queries concerned the Fed’s internal follow-up to an article published in the Wall Street Journal and a client note circulated by analyst firms Medley Global Advisors.

The two articles contained what appeared to be inside information about deliberations in the summer of 2012, when the Fed was debating the expansion of its quantitative easing program.

The Fed’s Office of Inspector General is conducting a separate probe of the incident. But members of Congress in recent weeks have demanded to know more about the internal staff response to the incident, part of a larger push by some on Capitol Hill for greater Fed transparency.

The summary released Monday said that then Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke had asked Fed legal and other staff to conduct a review which eventually encompassed interviews with more than 300 people involved in either the June, August or September 2012 Fed meetings.

It concluded that “these disclosures appeared to be unintentional or careless and none of the disclosures involved details of (Federal Open Market Committee) policy proposals or action.”

However, the staff summary also said that officials were unable to identify the specific source of some of the more detailed information included in the Medley Global Advisors client note.

The staff review led to a series of proposed changes to the Fed’s policies for handling the press and financial analysts or others “seeking insight” into the Fed’s deliberations.

Those recommendations were not made public.

(Reporting by Howard Schneider; Editing by Tom Brown)