South By North Strategies, Ltd.

The transcripts of meetings of the Federal Reserve’s Open Markets Committee  are not released until six years after the fact. Recently, the transcripts of 2004 meetings were released. It appears that some committee member suspected that a housing bubble was forming, yet there was little interest in even considering the possibility.

The transcripts are available here while The Washington Independent offers a summary here. The Huffington Post presents a liberal critique here, and Free Exchange counters here.

Meanwhile, Calculated Risk, which has been posting analyses of the transcripts, offered the following assessment:

So in March 2004 a Fed researcher was expressing concern about house prices being out of line with fundamentals, and in November 2004 a Fed President is talking about widespread speculation … and then there was no further discussion. The 2005 transcripts will be very interesting (to be released next year).