It seems like no big deal. My brother heard about this back in the late 90’s when he was still working on Wall Street.
His reply:
The reason is there are only a couple private clearing banks for Federal securities and the Fed did not want to be dependent on them. I think the reason to have a backup was always related to risk management. It could be that the risk is now seen as larger so there was this extra push to get it done, but maybe it just took a while to get the bureaucractic work done. I am much more curious about why the Fed stopped publishing the M3 numbers . .
