[ by Melanie Gretchen ] Public records are becoming less public.  That's the conclusion of William D. Cohan drew from his search into "the $1.2 trillion in 'secret loans' the Fed doled out during the financial crisis." Mr. Cohan is a former investment banker and the author of "Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World,"  Unfortunately for Mr. Cohan, his journey was more like a wild goose chase, making his findings significant, if minimalist. Upon starting each of his 3 books – about Lazard Freres, Goldman Sachs, and Bear Stearns – he submitted Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to the appropriate government agencies (the SEC, the State Department and the Federal Reserve) to obtain whatever documents, memos and e-mails they had about these companies and their senior executives. The Search: Inquiry 1. He sought from the SEC documents related to Lazard’s role in the Hartford-Mediobanca scandal starting in 1968 and ending in 1981: What He Was Looking to Find: Details of enforcement actions, or settlements that were reached where the firms "neither admitted nor denied" guilt, or other documentary evidence of the coziness that has for too long existed between Wall Street and Washington. After the Lazard book was published, Mr. Cohen received a thin file the State Department that was, supposedly, what it had in its possession about Felix Rohatyn’s 3 years as the U.S. ambassador to France.  Most of the 10 or so pages had been redacted. What the SEC Offered: Initially, the agency told him it could not release the information. When Mr. Cohan reminded the FOIA administrator that the SEC had already released the information, years before, to another journalist, the agency dug up the 40 boxes of unindexed, unorganized documents and invited him to a warehouse in Pennsylvania to take a look.  Eventually, he got the boxes shipped (at his expense) to the SEC's office in Manhattan, where he spent months reviewing the documents.  His efforts produced no tangible or substantive results. The Search: Inquiry 2. What He Was Looking to Find: Information on Goldman’s dealings with the Federal Reserve in the days leading up to 9/22/08, when it, along with Morgan Stanley, "had the good fortune to be allowed to become a bank holding company with lifesaving unlimited access to short-term funding." Specifically, Mr. Cohan was looking to find out "how that whole thing went down at the time, and how Goldman and Morgan Stanley got the Fed’s blessing but Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. did not."  In addition, he was interested in Goldman’s interactions with the Fed since. What the Fed Offered: A package from the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (albeit some 9 months after his Goldman book was published). Out of "everything from the kinds of loans the firm had been making to the tenor of its derivatives book to whether the real-estate loans it owns were backed by commercial properties or residential properties," Mr. Cohan was able to extrapolate some juicy figures: "For example, who knew that at the end of December 2011 Goldman had $44.2 trillion in the notional amount of derivatives contracts on its books?  Or that $36 trillion of that amount was for contracts of less than one year in tenor?" The "mind-numbing documents," according to Mr. Cohn, contained a detailed bunch of numbers (without explanation) about the kinds of risks Goldman was taking at a moment in time.  Needless to say, he didn't get the answers he wanted. "Where are the documents and e-mails about how Goldman was allowed by the Fed to become a bank holding company?  Where are the documents from the SEC about Goldman?" The Search: Inquiry 3. What He Was Looking For: The SEC documents related to the short-dated, out-of-the-money puts that investors spent millions of dollars buying in the last week of Bear Stearns’s existence. What He Found: Nothing. "The SEC said it was investigating who bought and sold these puts, but it has never made the results of its investigation public despite my FOIA request." What Mr. Cohan Did Come Up With. If anything, Mr. Cohan discovered how different his expectations of the FOIA were from his reality.  "If our government agencies continue to do everything in their considerable power to keep hidden information that belongs in the public realm, all the regulatory reform in the world won’t end the rot on Wall Street." According to William D. Cohan, Wall Street is still a closed street. For further details, go to [Bloomberg, 4/1/12].