> The Doomsday Book is intended to help lawyers of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York aid their clients in crisis management. It was originally distributed to a limited set of lawyers and select senior staff members. This has changed with time, as more lawyers are drawn into crisis management. Now, all FRBNY lawyers receive a copy of the Doomsday Book. Since the Doomsday Book seemed more confusing than helpful to non-lawyers, it is no longer distributed outside of the Legal Function. However, some individuals may have older versions on their shelves, and there is nothing wrong with sharing this version with clients.
Page 44 of the PDF has a good overview of what this document is intended to be.
Putting "Doomsday book" in the context of crisis management explains why this document exists. Basically, they don't want to be in the middle of a crisis and have legal uncertainties delay their ability to take action.
Interesting how the replies are assuming "doomsday" means some sort of apocalyptic societal collapse instead of acknowledging it could be a figure of speech used amongst lawyers at the FRBNY to refer to a crisis where time is of the essence..
This PDF is not the book. It is an introduction/summary of changes and a table of contents (TOC). The sample agreements are not included. The letter makes clear that FRBNY is actually not subject to the FOIA. I wonder if they charged for the service.
The presence of these agreements referred to in the TOC suggests that after a "doomsday" event, the FRBNY lawyers expect that other legal entities will still be entering into agreements. One HN comment muses about the lack of a functioning judiciary after this "doomsday". But without one how would such agreements be enforced. What would be the point of providing sample agreements if a doomsday event means agreements can no longer be enforced because the mechanism for enforcing them no longer exists.
> Putting "Doomsday book" in the context of crisis management explains why this document exists.
Really? They could hardly have picked a worse name; the Doomsday Book is, very famously, a register of who owns what. It has absolutely nothing to do with emergency response or crisis management.
But the document that the name implies it should be, a register of who owns what, is not at all an unlikely thing for the Federal Reserve Bank to have.
It seems to be a misnomer as I can’t imagine any ‘doomsday’ scenario where there would still be a functioning judiciary, Justice department, or any functioning clients for the FRBNY to help.
I think the fear is not that there is no justice to help them.
The point is that when exceptional measures are needed, you want to know how far you can go, without it coming back to you in the months afterwards.
It's a bit like InfoSec cyber incident playbooks: if customer data is being corrupted, can the production server be shut down? how bad does it need to be before the downtime no longer outweighs the corruption? who can take the decision?
If you don't spell that out in advance, you may find yourself in a situation where you lose time unnecessarily.
More Doomsday as "potentially existential (in a financial system sense) crisis" than a literal Doomsday. It fits perfectly into that frame as a compilation of other times the Fed has explored the limits of it's powers to address extreme situations in the financial system.
It's also unlikely courts etc would completely disappear even far into an actual "Doomsday" crisis. Hell the IRS has plans in place on how to collect taxes post nuclear apocalypse.
> It will take something more than a nuclear attack to wipe out taxpayers' obligations to the Internal Revenue Service.
> An addition to the Internal Revenue Manual, which is supposed to guide the conduct of all I.R.S. employees, declares that if the bomb is dropped, ''operations will be concentrated on collecting the taxes which will produce the greater revenue yield.''
I certainly would have thought this 'book' could encompass the Great Depression (1929 and on). It is the most defined 'doomsday' we should all learn from and act upon. I bet it is hard for anyone to learn from a distant past. Then I understood it was very law centric and that nothing was made to prevent a blackout, but mainly to escape any legal process that could interfere with any crisis management.
But my main focus was on the use of the Comic Sans font on page 1.
Good lord what is up with that PDF? Half of it seems to be (badly) OCRd, some pages look like a TIFF with 50dpi or lower resolution... that's not what I'd expect to get returned in a FOIA request.
having read and understood this doc seems like the bar for having an opinion about the role of the Fed and whether it should be "ended," "audited," or nationalized, given these crisis responses are a list of the essential functions for whatever might replace it.
Readit News
Page 44 of the PDF has a good overview of what this document is intended to be.
Putting "Doomsday book" in the context of crisis management explains why this document exists. Basically, they don't want to be in the middle of a crisis and have legal uncertainties delay their ability to take action.
This PDF is not the book. It is an introduction/summary of changes and a table of contents (TOC). The sample agreements are not included. The letter makes clear that FRBNY is actually not subject to the FOIA. I wonder if they charged for the service.
The presence of these agreements referred to in the TOC suggests that after a "doomsday" event, the FRBNY lawyers expect that other legal entities will still be entering into agreements. One HN comment muses about the lack of a functioning judiciary after this "doomsday". But without one how would such agreements be enforced. What would be the point of providing sample agreements if a doomsday event means agreements can no longer be enforced because the mechanism for enforcing them no longer exists.
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Really? They could hardly have picked a worse name; the Doomsday Book is, very famously, a register of who owns what. It has absolutely nothing to do with emergency response or crisis management.
But the document that the name implies it should be, a register of who owns what, is not at all an unlikely thing for the Federal Reserve Bank to have.
It is admittedly the same word written in Middle English, but I think context+spelling is enough to distinguish it.
Yes, but unfortunately it doesn't much explain what the contents are like. Would be great to get an laymen-readable summary of this from an LLM.
The point is that when exceptional measures are needed, you want to know how far you can go, without it coming back to you in the months afterwards.
It's a bit like InfoSec cyber incident playbooks: if customer data is being corrupted, can the production server be shut down? how bad does it need to be before the downtime no longer outweighs the corruption? who can take the decision?
If you don't spell that out in advance, you may find yourself in a situation where you lose time unnecessarily.
It's also unlikely courts etc would completely disappear even far into an actual "Doomsday" crisis. Hell the IRS has plans in place on how to collect taxes post nuclear apocalypse.
> It will take something more than a nuclear attack to wipe out taxpayers' obligations to the Internal Revenue Service.
> An addition to the Internal Revenue Manual, which is supposed to guide the conduct of all I.R.S. employees, declares that if the bomb is dropped, ''operations will be concentrated on collecting the taxes which will produce the greater revenue yield.''
But my main focus was on the use of the Comic Sans font on page 1.
[1] https://www.foia.gov/faq.html
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