Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED)
FRED provides Federal Reserve Board statistical releases, the Beige Book, working papers, historical data file series (monthly monetary data, interest rates, reserves, CPI, exchange rates).
Location: via URL
The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System is an independent federal government agency. The basic structure of the Federal Reserve System includes:
The Federal Reserve Board of Governors
The Federal Open Market Committee
The Federal Reserve Banks
The member banks.
Each Federal Reserve Bank and each member bank of the Federal Reserve System is subject to oversight by a Board of Governors.
The Federal Reserve System tries to control the size of the money supply as follows:
Buying and selling federal government securities.
When the Federal Reserve System buys government securities, it puts money into circulation. With more money around, interest rates tend to drop, and more money is borrowed and spent. When the Fed sells government securities, it in effect takes money out of circulation, causing interest rates to rise and making borrowing more difficult.[citation needed]
Regulating the amount of money that a member bank must keep in hand as reserves.
A member bank lends out most of the money deposited with it. If the Federal Reserve System says that a member bank must keep in reserve a larger fraction of its deposits, then the amount that the member bank can lend drops, loans become harder to obtain, and interest rates rise.[citation needed]
Changing the interest charged to banks that want to borrow money from the federal reserve system.
Member banks borrow from the Federal Reserve System to cover short-term needs. The interest that the Fed charges for this is called the discount rate; this will have an effect, though usually rather small, on how much money the member banks will borrow.
FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data), is one of the nation's largest databases of economic time series.