Federal Reserve

The Federal Reserve (known informally as "The Fed") was created in 1913 when President Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act into law, which effectively centralized America’s banking system. The Board of Governors is the presidentially appointed governing body.

The Federal Reserve has four basic functions, though it provides a variety of services to the United States Government. First, it influences market conditions by regulating national interest rates. Second, it supervises banking institutions and safeguards consumer credit rights. Third, it attempts to stabilize financial markets that would otherwise undermine the economic stability of the United States. Finally, it offers a variety of financial services to U.S. and internationally recognized foreign institutions.

The Federal Reserve also controls the discount rate (a basic interbank lending rate), and has the power to bail out major corporations, pending congressional approval - a power that is, however, highly contested in the political discourse.

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Latest blogosphere posts tagged “Federal Reserve”

• Guest Contribution: The Liquidity Trap Does Not Make Monetary Policy Ineffective

  
  Econbrowser — Authority: 661
  By Joseph E. Gagnon Today, were fortunate to have Joe Gagnon , senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics , as a guest contributor. With short-term risk-free interest rates essentially at zero in the major developed economies, conventional monetary policy is in a liquidity trap. As a ...
  4 hours ago

• Fewer Banks Tightening Standards, Fed Says

  
  DealBook — Authority: 782
  Fewer banks tightened their lending standards for companies and consumers in the third quarter as the economy grew for the first time in more than a year, a Federal Reserve survey showed.
  5 hours ago

• Central Bankers Fears As They Watch The Plummeting Dollar

  
  zero hedge — Authority: 761
  Barclays, whose primary goal these days seems to be to enjoin the Fed in ruining the dollar (talk to a gummy bear salesman from Barclays and you will get a "short the dollar" pitch), presumably in order to make even more money on their alleged huge short dollar prop exposure, is out with a new note from currency ...
  5 hours ago

• Fed – Loan Demand Fell, Lending Standards Tight

  
  Fair Loan Rate! — Authority: 136
  According to the Federal Reserve, the overall demand for most types of U.S. bank loans has fell greatly during the past three months, whereas the percentage of banks that were tightening their lending regulations and standards has declined from the peaks that were reached last year. The survey taken by the Fed ...
  6 hours ago

• The Looting of America: Billionaire Bailout Society

  
  Fuck Bankers — Authority: 166
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  7 hours ago

• Why Gold Has a LONG Way to Go

  
  Fuck Bankers — Authority: 166
  Why Gold Has a LONG Way to Go By Jeff Clark, Casey’s Gold & Resource Report A couple weeks ago, I had my TV tuned to a business show that loves to give predictions on the markets and the economy. On that day, one of the program’s regular guests declared it was time to “short” gold, that it had ...
  7 hours ago

• Sam Donaldson: Lets Get Rid Of The Fed Now Before They Do Further Damage

  
  Fuck Bankers — Authority: 166
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  7 hours ago

• Sam Donaldson: Lets Get Rid Of The Fed Now Before They Do Further Damage

  
  Gulag Blog — Authority: 167
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  7 hours ago

• The Man Who Predicted The Great Depression

  
  Veritas Vos Liberabit — Authority: 437
  Ludwig von Mises explained how government-induced credit expansions led to imbalances in the economy. By Mark Spitznagel from the WSJ, The Man Who Predicted the Depression , Ludwig von Mises was snubbed by economists world-wide as he warned of a credit crisis in the 1920s. We ignore the great Austrian at our ...
  8 hours ago

• What Is Inflation and How Do You Measure It?

  
  Veritas Vos Liberabit — Authority: 437
  What Is Inflation and How Does One Measure It? by Michael Shedlock To understand inflation, one must first understand what money is and how to measure it. Please read What is Money and How Does One Measure It? before attempting to understand what follows. Unfortunately there is no general agreement as to the ...
  8 hours ago

• The BLS Admits a Big Mistake

  
  Veritas Vos Liberabit — Authority: 437
  by Chuck Butler   I checked the currencies last night, as is my tradition of taking a peek at the Japanese open… And the dollar was getting sold. I thought to myself… “I bet G-20 got things going here!” And then this morning, when I turned on the currency screens, I saw that the dollar really got sold ...
  9 hours ago

• The Federal Reserve

  
  Irish Mortgage Brokers Blog — Authority: 125
  (this is taken from the Mises YouTube channel) Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson understood “The Monster”. But to most Americans today (and pretty much everybody else for that matter), Federal Reserve is just a name on the dollar bill. They have no idea of what the central bank does to the economy, or to their ...
  10 hours ago

• The Dollar Meltdown: A Book Review

  
  Veritas Vos Liberabit — Authority: 437
  The Dollar Meltdown: Book Review by Michael Shedlock I had the pleasure of reading a final finished copy of The Dollar Meltdown by Charles Goyette this past week.Congressman Ron Paul offers an opinion on the front cover to which I certainly concur: “Goyette does a great job explaining why America faces a ...
  10 hours ago

• Hard times coming… mark to fiction round 2…

  
  shopyield.com — Authority: 428
  BusinessWeek writes : Why This Real Estate Bust Is Different Unrealistic assumptions, layers of investors, sky-high prices, and possible fraud will make it hard to clean up the mess in commercial real estate “When Goldman Sachs (GS) sold complex bonds backed by the Arizona Grand Resort and other commercial ...
  10 hours ago

• Money, Banking and the Federal Reserve

  
  Voice For Liberty in Wichita — Authority: 475
  Events over the last year have placed our nation’s monetary system in focus. Or, at least it should be in sharp focus , as U.S. monetary policy and the Federal Reserve System bear much responsibility for the financial crisis and the accompanying recession. Few politicians, Ron Paul being one, are looking in the ...
  12 hours ago

• Yield curve may steepen “sharply” or it may not…

  
  shopyield.com — Authority: 428
  David Buik, a market analyst at BGC Partners, talks with Bloomberg’s Scarlet Fu about the demand for U.S. debt and expectations for the Treasury yield curve. Buik, speaking from London, also discusses the outlook for earnings reports from U.S. retailers. (Source: Bloomberg News / running time 2:30 minutes) As the ...
  12 hours ago

• The Coming U.S. Budget Attack

  
  NOVAKEO.COM — Authority: 134
  The United States is moving backwards…fast. State budget cuts are decimating essential health and social services; public education is being destroyed; the social safety net is in tatters. To make matters worse, all of this is occurring when the loss of jobs stands at a twenty-six year high with no end in sight. ...
  14 hours ago

• Too Big to Fail: Sanders Says "Break These Babies Up"

  
  POPULAR PROGRESSIVE — Authority: 119
  Sen. Bernie Sanders makes some very good points. Whether you agree with his assessment that the "to big to fail" companies need to be broken up, the point that these companies are costing us all is irrefutable. More than a year has gone by since Congress passed the $700 billion bailout of Wall Street. The Federal ...
  15 hours ago

• What is a Bank CD?

  
  Rich Credit Debt Loan — Authority: 547
  Before comparing interest rates or buying a CD at the bank, come to an understanding on how Certificates of Deposit work. Rules and Regulations of Bank CDs CDs, commonly known to many as bank certificates of deposit, are issued by many different banks. CDs are tightly regulated via state and federal banking ...
  15 hours ago

• The Fed & Unintended Consequences

  
  City Lakes Real Estate Blog — Authority: 136
  The Fed, Commodity Prices & Economic RecoveryTwelve hundred miles (give or take) from Wall Street, me thinks that a not-so virtuous cycle has emerged regarding the governments various and sundry efforts to nurse the economy back to health.The dynamic goes something like this:Step 1: the Federal Reserve and ...
  16 hours ago

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