Normally, I look at the Federal Reserve’s Commercial Paper information a few times per week. I like to keep on top of the real data rather than reading the spin from major media sources. I know it’s easy to forget about ABCP or pretend that the liquidity issues were resolved over the past few months. After all, the stock market is higher and pushing back to record levels. Isn’t that when investors choose to ignore reality the most? I am sure that more than a few investors and media hypesters believe that all that Fed liquidity injections and the lowering of the discount rate by 125 basis points over the past 2 months and 75 bps in the Fed Funds rate must have solved our problems. But so far, I have not seen evidence of the ABCP market being priced properly or traded freely. Not even an M-LEC plan brought to us by the Treasury department has been able to convince me things are all better now.

So imagine my surprise when I checked in on the commercial paper maturity distribution data at the Fed’s site. It hasn’t been updated for a couple of weeks and still has October 5th and October 12th data(most recent). Here’s what it says near the top of the site:

“This page will be updated at the discretion of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors”

For the record, I also routinely look at the yield spreads and outstandings of commercial paper at that site. The yields on various classes of CP are inverting, but that is not unusual unless it is sustained and becomes more extreme. The outstandings don’t look too surprising. By the way, both of those have been updated per usual and the data is current. Unfortunately, I cannot tell you the same thing about the maturity distribution page. Hopefully, the webmasters at the Fed will update it soon. It would really suck to have a big problem and not see it reported until after the fact. I am not saying there is a problem. But just that it would suck if the page was not “updated at the discretion of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.” I’ll let you know what it looks like when I see the current data.