I respectfully request an investigation of the Federal Reserve leak of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) minutes on April 9 and 10, 2013. According to Bloomberg News, the list of individuals who received the information included staff at Barclays PLC, BB&T Corp., BNP Paribas SA, Capital One Financial Corp., Fifth Third Bancorp, HSBC Holdings PLC, Nomura Holdings Inc., PNC Financial Services Group Inc., Regions Financial Corp., U.S. Bancorp, UBS AG and Wells Fargo & Co.

I have long been concerned about the Federal Reserve’s management of sensitive market-moving information. One example of blatant information “asymmetry” is the five-year lag before FOMC meeting transcripts are released to the public. As the Huffington Post reported in 2012, “Many of those people have since left the central bank and gone to work in the financial industry, taking with them privileged information about the Fed’s thinking that is still closed to the public.” [Here’s the HuffPost article.] This includes Susan Bies, who is now a board member at Bank of America; Laurence Meyer, who founded Macroeconomic Advisors; and Brian Madigan, who is now at Barclays.

Some relevant questions to consider during your investigation include:

1) Who specifically received this information early?

2) Did any insider trading result from this leak?

3) Did Goldman Sachs release a note encouraging clients to short gold [see this and this; Goldman’s note says: “We recommend initiating a short COMEX gold position ….”] right after receiving the leak information, due to the leak itself? Who else might have profited from the early release of this information?

4) What are the internal control procedures in place for the Federal Reserve to manage sensitive market-moving information? How did these procedures fail?

5) Why does the Federal Reserve continue to withhold the transcripts of FOMC meetings secret for five years, when there are many people who have been present at those meetings who have moved on to private sector employment within that blackout period?