Dodd-Frank brought Bloomberg News a portion of what it wanted. On December 1, 2010, the Fed released information on lending through five of its emergency programs from August 2007 to April 2010. The five were: the Asset-Backed Commercial Paper Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility; the Commercial Paper Funding Facility; the Primary Dealer Credit Facility; the Term Auction Facility; and the Term Securities Lending Facility. ^[31] The 18 databases it made public included more than 21,000 transactions by banks that had borrowed through the emergency lending programs. A press release noted that discount window information would be published after a two-year lag.

For weeks before, Bloomberg had been gearing up for the data release. Editor John Voskuhl assembled a group of qualified reporters to sift through and make sense of it. Voskuhl, an editor for Projects and Investigations, drew on several Bloomberg teams: finance, which covered banks; the economy team, which covered the Fed; and the corporate finance team, which wrote about debt. Eventually, six editors and some two dozen reporters reviewed the records, looking for anomalies or newsworthy material. Ivry, with his deep knowledge of the lawsuit against the Fed, was asked to write many of the stories. Recalls Voskuhl:

We had a lot of expert reporters who were familiar with these issues, who were familiar with the liquidity programs, familiar with the discount window, who knew their way around news sources at the banks, news sources at the Fed, and could quickly look at this stuff and make sense out of it.

Since all news organizations got the data simultaneously, Voskuhl wanted to make sure that Bloomberg News outshone the competition, especially since they were the ones who had filed the original FOIA and brought the lawsuit. We knew we had to be prepared on that day to basically swamp the competition, says Voskuhl. We had to give it more attention, more thought, more planning and more coordination than any other news agency would. ^[32]

Washington, DC-based Bloomberg reporter Scott Lanman picked up a CD-ROM with the data at the Feds PR office, and took it to Bloomberg s Washington bureau, where he put the information on a shared drive so that data specialists in Bloombergs Princeton, New Jersey, office and reporters and editors in New York and Boston would have access to the data. Their first take on the data was that it would take weeks to process in detail. As Editor Voskuhl recalls:

We saw that the Fed had set this up so that it was going to be very difficult to see just how extensively any particular bank or company was using its lending at the time. We quickly realized that we had to write our initial batch of stories just about the most frequent borrowers, and what were their typical borrowing amounts.

Voskuhl on how reporters and editors wrote the early stories based on the Fed data release.

Bloomberg in short order published 13 stories based on the data. Fed Emergency Borrowers Ranged From GE to McDonalds, for example, listed some of the borrowers who had received what the Fed identified as $3.3 trillion in emergency aid. ^[33] Another story reviewed data about the collateral pledged by recipients of $885 billion in loans . ^[34] A third examined Fed lending not just to US banks, but to many European banks as well.

But these stories did not get down to the nitty gritty. To figure out what was buried in the spreadsheets, Voskuhl enlisted Bradley Keoun, a finance reporter who had covered Citigroup. In mid-December, Keoun asked Phil Kuntz, Bloomberg News resident data expert, to help out. The essence of the exchange is basically he said, I hear you know how to do Excel, remembers Kuntz. Can you help me out with something? I have a little Excel problem. I said, Okay, Ill help you out. ^[35] That little Excel problem turned into a months-long project for both of them.