Business, Legal & Accounting Glossary
The Federal Reserve Board governs the Federal Reserve System.
The Federal Reserve Board or the ‘Fed’ as it’s known, is the U.S. central bank – the equivalent of our own Bank of England.
The US central bank is actually made up of 12 Federal Reserve Banks from across the country.
The Federal Reserve Board is the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, or Fed, the US central bank.
The Federal Reserve Board sets the Fed’s monetary policy.
Implementation of most Federal Reserve Board monetary policy objectives occurs in the form of open market operations conducted by the Federal Open Market Committee, or FOMC, in New York. Federal Reserve Board members, including the Chairman and Vice-Chairman, are political appointees.
Federal Reserve Board meetings are also attended by a rotating subset of the 12 individual Federal Reserve Bank branch presidents.
Some Federal Reserve Board meetings are open to the public, but meetings about monetary policy are always closed.
The Federal Reserve Board meets in Washington, DC, generally twice each month.
The ‘Fed’s role is :
The tool by which the ‘Fed’ controls monetary policy is via movements in the ‘Fed Funds’ interest rate. This is the interest rate at which banks in the U.S. lend to themselves. It’s a short-term (day-to-day) rate.
It’s important, but not as influential as the ‘discount rate’ – the equivalent of base rates in the U.K.
The sheer size of the U.S. economy traditionally means that changes in interest rates announced in Washington immediately have a knock-on effect in the London financial markets as investors re-adjust to lower U.S. borrowing costs.
Clearly, if U.S. interest rates are falling, it may persuade some investors and speculators to move cash out of the dollar, in favour of the Pound, Euro etc.
The Federal Reserve Board, or “Fed,” is made up of seven presidential appointees whose terms are 14 years in length. The Fed’s job is to govern the Federal Reserve System, which was created in 1913 to bring federal oversight to a banking system that, at the time, was best described as “one big ugly mess.”
The Federal Reserve System does much of the mundane work that is necessary for any monetary system — processing checks, processing Treasury securities transactions, lending money, and, of course, keeping various large, marbled bank halls well-polished. Federal Reserve member banks and their holding companies must also submit to the supervision of the Fed, which votes a movie critic-style “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” to proposed mergers in the banking industry.
The Fed’s real authority, and the reason it is mentioned on the news even more often than which celebrities might run for president, is its influence over monetary policy. That influence is exercised by the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), which is made up of the seven members of the Federal Reserve Board and five Federal Reserve Bank presidents, who serve on the committee on a rotating basis.
The FOMC meets eight times a year. The meetings traditionally include a selection of tasty beverages and fine breakfast rolls as well as summaries of international economic developments, reports on conditions in the domestic financial markets and the banking system, and a presentation on the U.S. economy as a whole. When the members of the FOMC have finished breakfast, policy options are laid out and a long discussion follows, at the end of which a vote is taken that decides whether the Fed will act, and possibly what to order for lunch. The minutes of Fed meetings are made available only months after the fact, and disclosures about dinner plans are never announced.
If the FOMC does take action, it is typically to raise or lower the Federal Funds Rate, which is the interest rate banks charge each other for overnight credit. Banks holding excess reserves will lend to other banks, which may need to borrow funds because they don’t have enough cash on hand to meet their own reserve requirements (which, remember, are set by the Fed). The raising or lowering of this interest rate can have important effects on the cost of operating America’s businesses and the expectations of profits for companies borrowing money.
What makes the whole process especially confusing is that the Fed’s instruments are only indirectly connected to the economy as a whole. The Fed doesn’t control the market, but it does hold sway over short-term interest rates — not only because that’s part of the interest-rate spectrum affected by its open market operations, but because the market, in the short term, sometimes “fears” the Fed.
You may want to try and get in close with someone involved in the FED so that you can get some big loans later.
You should always do your best to keep good standing with the FED so that you can continue to borrow from them.
The kid I grew up down the street from became a well-respected economist and eventually went on the oversee the entire American economy as the Chairman of the Fed.
Ben Bernanke
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This glossary post was last updated: 31st October, 2021 | 0 Views.