Purpose
The primary motivation for creating the Federal Reserve System was to address banking panics. Other purposes are stated in the Federal Reserve Act, such as "to furnish an elastic currency, to afford means of rediscounting commercial paper, to establish a more effective supervision of banking in the United States, and for other purposes". Before the founding of the Federal Reserve System, the United States underwent several financial crises. A particularly severe crisis in 1907 led Congress to enact the Federal Reserve Act in 1913. Today the Federal Reserve System has responsibilities in addition to ensuring the stability of the financial system.
Current functions of the Federal Reserve System include:
- To address the problem of banking panics
- To serve as the central bank for the United States
- To strike a balance between private interests of banks and the centralized responsibility of government
- To supervise and regulate banking institutions
- To protect the credit rights of consumers
- To manage the nation's money supply through monetary policy to achieve the sometimes-conflicting goals of
- maximum employment
- stable prices, including prevention of either inflation or deflation
- moderate long-term interest rates
- To maintain the stability of the financial system and contain systemic risk in financial markets
- To provide financial services to depository institutions, the U.S. government, and foreign official institutions, including playing a major role in operating the nation's payments system
- To facilitate the exchange of payments among regions
- To respond to local liquidity needs
- To strengthen U.S. standing in the world economy
Read more about this topic: Federal Reserve System
Famous quotes containing the word purpose:
“Politics should share one purpose with religion: the steady emancipation of the individual through the education of his passions.”
—George F. Will (b. 1941)
“If God bestowed immortality on every man then when he made him, and he made many to whom he never purposed to give his saving grace, what did his Lordship think that God gave any man immortality with purpose only to make him capable of immortal torments? It is a hard saying, and I think cannot piously be believed. I am sure it can never be proved by the canonical Scripture.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)
“I want that glib and oily art
To speak and purpose not, since what I well intend,
I’ll do’t before I speak.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)