A Good Time for Fed Bad News?

There's an old habit in the corporate PR world: If you got bad news ... release it right before a holiday.

Why? Chances are the I-work-too-hard-gotta-get-outta-here newies might miss it. Or people will forget about it over the long weekend. Of course, us media types are such buzzards that we know good roadkill comes at the holiday dusk, so to speak, so we watch and ...

Allen Wastler
Managing Editor, CNBC.com

Hey, guess what? At 4:30 p.m. today, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York will reveal for the first time the total value it now places on underlying assets it took from Bear Stearns. In March, the Fed branch put up $30 billion in financing for those assets. (Read more about it here).

Hmmm ... think those assets are worth $30 billion now? For that matter, were they then?

Well, you can find out this afternoon on our site. We'll be watching ... at 4:30 p.m. right before a long weekend. (Steve Liesman, CNBC's top economic guy, tells me this is a regularly scheduled event that just happened to fall this way. I still have my doubts).

Update

Okay, okay ... so it wasn't anything drastic. A drop of $1 billion in the Bear Stearns portfolio. These days, what's a billion? (Okay, it'd be great in the ole paycheck).

But if the news had been super bad, it'd have been a great time to release.