Alan Grayson  (D-FL) was on MSNBC’s ”Morning Meeting” with Dylan Ratigan today:

Ratigan:  Congressman Grayson now joins the Morning Meeting.  Your amendment approved by the House Financial Services Committee – a huge step forward.  Where do you go from here and what’s your level of confidence, Representative, that you can continue the momentum behind this piece of legislation?

Grayson:  Where we go is to stop the secret bailouts.  There have been hints and hints now for more than two years that the Fed has been conducting huge bailouts on the scale of hundreds of billions of dollars to favor large, failed banks.  Now we’re going to find out all about it and we’re going to decide whether it’s good or bad.

Ratigan:  Comments from both a former Fed chief, Alan Greenspan, and for that matter, former Fed chief (going back even further) Paul Volcker, to the House Financial Services Committee:  they say, “We can assure you that this protection of internal deliberations in reaching decisions that will affect market conditions, and could expose sensitive information about particular institutions, is indispensable in the Federal Reserve’s conduct of monetary policy.”  Basically, if you look behind the curtain, you won’t like what you’ll see, and it will screw things up worse.   How do you respond to that?

Grayson:  Well we are in Emerald City right now, we have arrived in Emerald City; Toto has run underneath the curtain, and we’re about to see who is that man the curtain and what’s he up to. [both laughing]

Ratigan:  And what do you think is behind the curtain?

Grayson:  Well, what I think is: favoritism to selected big banks that have failed and led us to the brink of national bankruptcy.

Ratigan:  What of the fact that being a bank no longer pays that much money – to lend money.  Lending, because of modern technology, is a low-profit business, so the government legalized much higher-profit ways to do it in secret, and basically, the Federal Reserve is their back end.  Are we on our way to restoring laws for lending in this country?

Grayson:  Listen.  Capitalism requires rewarding success and punishing failure.  That’s what Joseph Schumpeter said almost a century ago.  So far, we’ve seen plenty of reward for success on Wall Street, but no punishment for failure, not when the Fed is handing out blank checks.

Ratigan:  Understood Representative Grayson, enjoy your day, thanks for the time.

Tyler Durden has more.