Meanwhile, the team continued to parse, catalogue and analyze the discount window data along with that released in December. Only by May was the master spreadsheet close to done. Populating the data visualization tool with data from the spreadsheet was also proving very time-consuming. Says Friedman:

Building the database was really difficult, time-consuming, and you don’t want to make mistakes. The Fed numbers were released by different programs and different borrowers. So Citigroup might have had 75 different units that were borrowing money. And some might not even have been called Citigroup. So we had to go through every single borrower, entity, attach it to the banking group it was part of, and then do that for all seven programs. It was a monster.

Friedman and the team adopted Keoun and Kuntz’s early hope: that the data visualization would allow readers to compare sums the largest borrowers had out on any given day with what the banks were saying publicly at the time about their stability. So Friedman assigned Bloomberg reporters worldwide to research bank executives’ contemporary comments about their institutions’ financial health, and write them up in what the team called blurbs. Adding the blurbs to the online charts took yet more time. Recalls Keoun: “It was a very significant project to take Phil’s massive spreadsheet (which took a long time to get right and fact-check), to work with our in-house data visualization people to develop the interactive graphical tool and load in the data, and finally to add in the blurbs for each bank.”

As the data became clear, however, Friedman and his team were finally able to start mapping out the stories to accompany publication of the interactive data analysis tool. By July 2011, well-substantiated and startling numbers had emerged. The team calculated that the largest amount the Fed had loaned on a single day was $1.2 trillion on December 5, 2008. This represented total lending that day to all banks under all seven of the programs on which the Fed had provided details. That was more than 25 times the previous lending peak of $46 billion on September 12, 2001—the day after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, DC. The numbers revealed for the first time the extent to which the world’s largest banks depended on the Fed to stay afloat, even as they issued public statements of fiscal strength.

The team had also identified the days of peak lending for individual banks. Some of the most avid customers of Fed emergency lending programs were the nation’s largest banks—several of which had publicly asserted their fiscal health while taking billions from the Fed to maintain the required capital reserves. Morgan Stanley, for example, was the largest single-day borrower. On September 29, 2008, shortly after the Lehman collapse, it had needed $107.3 billion—almost three times the firm’s total profits over the preceding decade. On that same day, Morgan Stanley had issued a press release about a $9 billion investment from a Japanese company—but said nothing about the Fed loan.

Citigroup hit its daily lending peak of $99.5 billion in January 2009; Bank of America borrowed its maximum $91.4 billion in March 2009. ^[45] The Bloomberg reporters also planned to include in the story details about the questionable collateral the Fed had accepted against the emergency program loans, and the favorable interest rates it made available to banks while individual homeowners were facing eviction and foreclosure. Typically, interest rates for last-resort bank lending were above-market; this was often reversed during the crisis.

Ivry’s view . But as Ivry reviewed the new material generated by the database, he was more convinced than ever that it was both accurate and responsible to report aggregate bank borrowing as well as the peaks. Ivry wanted to total the amount that each bank had borrowed over the course of the crisis, even if it had taken out a loan overnight and repaid it the next day. “I thought, well, you count it as $5 billion if they borrow a billion dollars every day for five days.  It’s the same as borrowing $5 billion,” says Ivry.

To help readers keep both forest and trees in focus, he pushed for highlighting the $3.5 trillion number the Fed itself had made public—and Bloomberg had published—in December 2010 and March 2011. It was a nearly unimaginable number and one that dwarfed the $700 billion authorized under TARP. “How much would it take for people to notice,” he asked. “Our number—the aggregate number—was three times [the $1.2 trillion peak]. Maybe, just maybe, that would.”

The resulting headline would be attention-grabbing--and accurate. It could even be judged conservative: on July 21, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) published a report that, using a different methodology, calculated overall Fed lending during the crisis at $16 trillion. ^[46] “We had to figure out what is going to be useful for readers, and what is going to be accurate and fair to the banks,” he adds.

I thought, this is an outrage. We’re talking about trillions of dollars… We worked on this thing for three years. Nobody’s paying attention to us. Let’s have that big number, as long as it’s correct.

Ivry also remembered the jarring silence that had greeted the November 2008 story he and Pittman wrote about government pledges to banks. This 2011 story was no longer about promises—but about money actually spent. Ivry felt it was even more important than the 2008 story. Most banks, he was convinced, had been close to insolvency in the fall of 2008, even as their CEOs maintained that all was well. In his view, government funding in 2008-09 had allowed them to conceal fundamental weaknesses. Yet their survival allowed the banks in 2011 to argue that efforts to regulate them would be “punishing success”; that breaking them up would render them uncompetitive in the global market.

Ivry felt the public should be able to judge for itself how well the banks had coped, and whether they needed regulation or not. The bigger number, he was convinced, would attract the kind of attention to the story that it deserved. He says:

If the truth were known—if somehow we got more people to see and understand what we’d uncovered—the lie that they are competent, competitive institutions would hold no water and Wall Street would not be dominating Washington.

Ivry would not be writing any of the stories for the August series edited by Friedman. But he cared about the numbers issue and continued to press his case. He felt strongly that Bloomberg would be sacrificing an important opportunity for major public and policy impact if it failed to go with the larger, aggregate number.