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> 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

by cj 2y ago

> 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.

MichaelZuo 2y ago
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.
- ArnoVW 2y ago
  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.
  - myself248 2y ago
    Like the Internet Archive feeling that "oh shit the entire society just shut down" in the days after Covid lockdowns started, and uncapping their digital lending because they were the only "library" you could still visit. And then getting sued six ways from sunday over it, years later when the crisis mood had faded and the help-people-any-way-we-can vibes were thoroughly forgotten. Time to make sure no good deed goes unpunished! Yeah. This document makes a LOT of sense.
    - grapescheesee 2y ago
      WBUR just aired an interview today with Brewster Kahle. It would be a very sad day if the Internet Archive stopped resolving, or was stopped from benefiting the common good. https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2025/01/07/internet-archive-wayback-machine-copyright-lawsuit https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2025/01/07/internet-archive-way...
    - sneak 2y ago
      The self-own that was the IA taking it upon themselves to decide that copyright would not be enforced upon them by big rightsholders “because COVID” is not a good deed. It is foolishness masquerading as virtue. I used to be a donor, but no more, as this was an unforced error. The IA is in danger because the IA management was dumb. I don’t believe in copyright, personally, and I’ve been an avid pirate of every type of media since I got on the internet at 9.6kbps, but to think that Big Content won’t sue whenever and however they can is simply naïve.
      - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
        > The self-own that was the IA taking it upon themselves to decide that copyright would not be enforced upon them by big rightsholders “because COVID” is not a good deed. The theory was that the courts would find it to be fair use. Which isn't a crazy theory at all because making exceptions for exceptional circumstances is exactly the sort of things courts do, and fair use is exactly the sort of thing that gives them the latitude to do it if they want to. IA's issue is that they're librarians and look at things like librarians do. If people lose access to books, is that an emergency? It could sometimes be a matter of life and death -- people need some information or something bad will happen and now they don't have access to it -- but that's kind of abstract and it's not as visceral. People understand kicking down a door to prevent someone from electrocuting themselves better than they understand that the same thing can happen if people lose access to the information needed to prevent it. So to a librarian, of course that's an emergency. And then the other side of that is, what are you balancing it against? Some temporary copies being made of books that libraries all over have already paid for and have in their collections, and only for the duration of the pandemic? That's not a ridiculous trade off, that's completely reasonable. The libraries bought the books and the patrons read them, same as it ever was. In a temporary emergency, how much does it matter that the accounting is completely perfect rather than the plausible approximation you get based on assuming that before they knew there would be a pandemic, libraries had purchased books in proportion to how much demand there would be for them? Has it even been proved that a single book was simultaneously lent out more times by IA than there were copies of it on the shelves in locked down libraries everywhere? That's not a crazy argument. The problem is, it doesn't feel like an emergency anymore. Worse, there was a lot of overreach during COVID, and many people are now of the sense that much of the response was excessive. And then you get a conflation between "shutting down every library might have been an overreaction" and "given that libraries were forcibly shut down, lending books in a different way was temporarily justifiable" and the people making the second argument get painted with the negative sentiment derived from the first by Monday morning quarterbacks.
- rtkwe 2y ago
  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.
  - AdamN 2y ago
    Death AND Taxes
  - Retric 2y ago
    There’s levels of Doomsdays. As emotional as people get over surface level details of government, there’s a long way down from a civilization unable to make CPU’s before the literal stone age. So sure people hate the IRS, but codified tax collection is the single most important function of modern government. Without that you don’t have private property or free markets just warlords arbitrarily seizing property which destroys whatever is left of society very quickly.
    - rtkwe 2y ago
      That's kind of what I'm getting at with the first part of my post. Doomsday for the Fed is "major collapse of sector(s) the US economy they fail to arrest" or esoteric economic woe that requires drastic but relatively novel (legally speaking) measures to address. The kind of systemic seizing that some of the people who had the foresight and money to have made a killing on 2008 but didn't because they feared the wholesale collapse would happen because they didn't factor in the firehose of money that would be directed at the problem. Complete societal collapse is outside their purview because they depend on there to be an economy to manage which ceases to meaningfully exist at certain points on the Doomsday scale.
    - trinsic2 2y ago
      Maybe with my limited knowledge I am wrong about this, but it seems like "codified tax collection" as it relates to private property and free markets, at least in the US, is that they designed it to create the illusion of a functioning system. In reality it serves special interests because they can afford to navigate it's complexities, while the general population is held hostage to this system. Secondly, income tax money doesn't appear to actually go to the places it should, like infrastructure, and instead towards unjust wars that are waged to democratize(hold-hostage) countries that don't play along with capitalism. I think the tax system, in its current state, is an illusion of providing a just system when what it really does is turns a country of free people into wage slaves working for overlords (people with money).
- pjc50 2y ago
  Think "2008 crisis" rather than actual apocalypse.
- mmanfrin 2y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesday_Book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesday_Book
- jowea 2y ago
  https://www.nytimes.com/1989/03/28/business/nuclear-war-plan-by-irs.html https://www.nytimes.com/1989/03/28/business/nuclear-war-plan... > 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.''
  - warner25 2y ago
    One thing that I think I've learned, to my surprise, even for most people in uniform on either side, is that much of life during wartime is still mostly "business as usual." I think we all tend to have poorly calibrated mental models of this because coverage of war tends to focus on the heaviest action and worst of the devastation. I don't mean to downplay how awful that can be, or how far the effects can reverberate (even generations later), but like... the vast majority of people still go about their daily lives, doing their usual jobs, doing the mundane things, even having fun, supply chains and infrastructure and institutions seem to be quite resilient, etc. Locally and individually, everything can change in an instant in combat (even then, most people walk away from that and continue their lives), but nationally things can keep rolling along as war drags on much more slowly than we all might expect or hope. So I have little doubt that the IRS would keep doing its thing, and tax returns would need to be filed (albeit maybe with extended deadlines), even in the wake of a nuclear attack. I suppose the question is how much do things unravel in a scenario of nuclear counter-attack, and counter-counter-attack, etc. for which we have no historical precedent to think about.
    - chillingeffect 2y ago
      It depends on how well the country is winning. E.g. Ukraine is still quite functional. Palestine is approaching a complete collapse.
      - goatsi 2y ago
        If you are talking about Gaza, there were reports a few days ago that Israel is considering cutting back on the amount of aid allowed in once Trump is in office, claiming that Hamas is still able to fund itself by "taxing" aid.
jessriedel 2y ago
> Page 44 of the PDF has a good overview of what this document is intended to be. 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.
thaumasiotes 2y ago
> 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.
- jjmarr 2y ago
  You're thinking of the Domesday Book. It is admittedly the same word written in Middle English, but I think context+spelling is enough to distinguish it.
  - thaumasiotes 2y ago
    Som of us haue reuised oure spelynge syns þe 1100s.
    - SideQuark 2y ago
      It is still currently spelled "Domesday book". Go ahead and try and find it via your incorrect spelling and post the link to us. Or maybe you're referring to the modern novels which are titled "Doomsday book"? For the record, when you misspell it as you insist on doing, the top hit is the correct spelling with a link to the correct version: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesday_Book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesday_Book. Actually pretty much every top hit is the correct spelling, which should give you the idea your misspelling is just that, a misspelling. Here's the Grammarist entry on the difference: https://grammarist.com/usage/doomsday-vs-domesday/ https://grammarist.com/usage/doomsday-vs-domesday/ That should make it clear to you. Instead of doubling down on your ignorance you could choose to learn when presented new knowledge.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
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.

by cj 2y ago

MichaelZuo 2y ago

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.

ArnoVW 2y ago
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.
- myself248 2y ago
  Like the Internet Archive feeling that "oh shit the entire society just shut down" in the days after Covid lockdowns started, and uncapping their digital lending because they were the only "library" you could still visit. And then getting sued six ways from sunday over it, years later when the crisis mood had faded and the help-people-any-way-we-can vibes were thoroughly forgotten. Time to make sure no good deed goes unpunished! Yeah. This document makes a LOT of sense.
  - grapescheesee 2y ago
    WBUR just aired an interview today with Brewster Kahle. It would be a very sad day if the Internet Archive stopped resolving, or was stopped from benefiting the common good. https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2025/01/07/internet-archive-wayback-machine-copyright-lawsuit https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2025/01/07/internet-archive-way...
  - sneak 2y ago
    The self-own that was the IA taking it upon themselves to decide that copyright would not be enforced upon them by big rightsholders “because COVID” is not a good deed. It is foolishness masquerading as virtue. I used to be a donor, but no more, as this was an unforced error. The IA is in danger because the IA management was dumb. I don’t believe in copyright, personally, and I’ve been an avid pirate of every type of media since I got on the internet at 9.6kbps, but to think that Big Content won’t sue whenever and however they can is simply naïve.
    - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      > The self-own that was the IA taking it upon themselves to decide that copyright would not be enforced upon them by big rightsholders “because COVID” is not a good deed. The theory was that the courts would find it to be fair use. Which isn't a crazy theory at all because making exceptions for exceptional circumstances is exactly the sort of things courts do, and fair use is exactly the sort of thing that gives them the latitude to do it if they want to. IA's issue is that they're librarians and look at things like librarians do. If people lose access to books, is that an emergency? It could sometimes be a matter of life and death -- people need some information or something bad will happen and now they don't have access to it -- but that's kind of abstract and it's not as visceral. People understand kicking down a door to prevent someone from electrocuting themselves better than they understand that the same thing can happen if people lose access to the information needed to prevent it. So to a librarian, of course that's an emergency. And then the other side of that is, what are you balancing it against? Some temporary copies being made of books that libraries all over have already paid for and have in their collections, and only for the duration of the pandemic? That's not a ridiculous trade off, that's completely reasonable. The libraries bought the books and the patrons read them, same as it ever was. In a temporary emergency, how much does it matter that the accounting is completely perfect rather than the plausible approximation you get based on assuming that before they knew there would be a pandemic, libraries had purchased books in proportion to how much demand there would be for them? Has it even been proved that a single book was simultaneously lent out more times by IA than there were copies of it on the shelves in locked down libraries everywhere? That's not a crazy argument. The problem is, it doesn't feel like an emergency anymore. Worse, there was a lot of overreach during COVID, and many people are now of the sense that much of the response was excessive. And then you get a conflation between "shutting down every library might have been an overreaction" and "given that libraries were forcibly shut down, lending books in a different way was temporarily justifiable" and the people making the second argument get painted with the negative sentiment derived from the first by Monday morning quarterbacks.
rtkwe 2y ago
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.
- AdamN 2y ago
  Death AND Taxes
- Retric 2y ago
  There’s levels of Doomsdays. As emotional as people get over surface level details of government, there’s a long way down from a civilization unable to make CPU’s before the literal stone age. So sure people hate the IRS, but codified tax collection is the single most important function of modern government. Without that you don’t have private property or free markets just warlords arbitrarily seizing property which destroys whatever is left of society very quickly.
  - rtkwe 2y ago
    That's kind of what I'm getting at with the first part of my post. Doomsday for the Fed is "major collapse of sector(s) the US economy they fail to arrest" or esoteric economic woe that requires drastic but relatively novel (legally speaking) measures to address. The kind of systemic seizing that some of the people who had the foresight and money to have made a killing on 2008 but didn't because they feared the wholesale collapse would happen because they didn't factor in the firehose of money that would be directed at the problem. Complete societal collapse is outside their purview because they depend on there to be an economy to manage which ceases to meaningfully exist at certain points on the Doomsday scale.
  - trinsic2 2y ago
    Maybe with my limited knowledge I am wrong about this, but it seems like "codified tax collection" as it relates to private property and free markets, at least in the US, is that they designed it to create the illusion of a functioning system. In reality it serves special interests because they can afford to navigate it's complexities, while the general population is held hostage to this system. Secondly, income tax money doesn't appear to actually go to the places it should, like infrastructure, and instead towards unjust wars that are waged to democratize(hold-hostage) countries that don't play along with capitalism. I think the tax system, in its current state, is an illusion of providing a just system when what it really does is turns a country of free people into wage slaves working for overlords (people with money).
pjc50 2y ago
Think "2008 crisis" rather than actual apocalypse.
mmanfrin 2y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesday_Book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesday_Book
jowea 2y ago
https://www.nytimes.com/1989/03/28/business/nuclear-war-plan-by-irs.html https://www.nytimes.com/1989/03/28/business/nuclear-war-plan... > 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.''
- warner25 2y ago
  One thing that I think I've learned, to my surprise, even for most people in uniform on either side, is that much of life during wartime is still mostly "business as usual." I think we all tend to have poorly calibrated mental models of this because coverage of war tends to focus on the heaviest action and worst of the devastation. I don't mean to downplay how awful that can be, or how far the effects can reverberate (even generations later), but like... the vast majority of people still go about their daily lives, doing their usual jobs, doing the mundane things, even having fun, supply chains and infrastructure and institutions seem to be quite resilient, etc. Locally and individually, everything can change in an instant in combat (even then, most people walk away from that and continue their lives), but nationally things can keep rolling along as war drags on much more slowly than we all might expect or hope. So I have little doubt that the IRS would keep doing its thing, and tax returns would need to be filed (albeit maybe with extended deadlines), even in the wake of a nuclear attack. I suppose the question is how much do things unravel in a scenario of nuclear counter-attack, and counter-counter-attack, etc. for which we have no historical precedent to think about.
  - chillingeffect 2y ago
    It depends on how well the country is winning. E.g. Ukraine is still quite functional. Palestine is approaching a complete collapse.
    - goatsi 2y ago
      If you are talking about Gaza, there were reports a few days ago that Israel is considering cutting back on the amount of aid allowed in once Trump is in office, claiming that Hamas is still able to fund itself by "taxing" aid.

jessriedel 2y ago

> Page 44 of the PDF has a good overview of what this document is intended to be. 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.

thaumasiotes 2y ago

> 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.

jjmarr 2y ago
You're thinking of the Domesday Book. It is admittedly the same word written in Middle English, but I think context+spelling is enough to distinguish it.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  Som of us haue reuised oure spelynge syns þe 1100s.
  - SideQuark 2y ago
    It is still currently spelled "Domesday book". Go ahead and try and find it via your incorrect spelling and post the link to us. Or maybe you're referring to the modern novels which are titled "Doomsday book"? For the record, when you misspell it as you insist on doing, the top hit is the correct spelling with a link to the correct version: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesday_Book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesday_Book. Actually pretty much every top hit is the correct spelling, which should give you the idea your misspelling is just that, a misspelling. Here's the Grammarist entry on the difference: https://grammarist.com/usage/doomsday-vs-domesday/ https://grammarist.com/usage/doomsday-vs-domesday/ That should make it clear to you. Instead of doubling down on your ignorance you could choose to learn when presented new knowledge.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago

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.