What Is a Central Bank, and Does the U.S. Have One?

What Is a Central Bank?

A central bank is a financial institution responsible for the formulation of monetary policy and the regulation of member banks. It typically has privileged control over the production and distribution of money and credit for a nation or a group of nations.

Central banks are inherently non-market-based or even anti-competitive institutions. Although some are nationalized, many central banks are not government agencies, and so are often touted as being politically independent. However, even if a central bank is not legally owned by the government, its privileges are established and protected by law.

The critical feature of a central bank—distinguishing it from other banks—is its legal monopoly status, which gives it the privilege to issue banknotes and cash. Private commercial banks are only permitted to issue demand liabilities, such as checking deposits.

Understanding Central Banks

Although responsibilities range widely depending on country, central banks' duties usually fall into three areas. 

First, central banks control and manipulate the national money supply. They influence the sentiment of markets as they issue currency and set interest rates on loans and bonds. Typically, central banks raise interest rates to slow growth and avoid inflation; they lower them to spur growth, industrial activity, and consumer spending. In this way, they manage monetary policy to guide the country's economy and achieve economic goals, such as full employment.

Second, they regulate member banks through capital requirements, reserve requirements, and deposit guarantees, among other tools. They also provide loans and services for a nation’s banks and its government and manage foreign exchange reserves.

Finally, a central bank also acts as an emergency lender to distressed commercial banks and other institutions, and sometimes even a government. By purchasing government debt obligations, for example, the central bank provides a politically attractive alternative to taxation when a government needs to increase revenue.

The Federal Reserve

In the U.S., the central bank is the Federal Reserve System, also known as "the Fed," for short. The Federal Reserve Board (FRB), the governing body of the Fed, can affect the national money supply by changing reserve requirements. When it lowers requirement minimums, banks can lend more money, and the economy’s money supply climbs. In contrast, when it raises reserve requirements, the money supply decreases. The Federal Reserve was established with the 1913 Federal Reserve Act.

When the Fed lowers the discount rate that banks pay on short-term loans, it also increases liquidity. Lower rates increase the money supply, which in turn boosts economic activity, though this can fuel inflation.

The Fed can also conduct open market operations to change the federal funds rate. When the Fed buys government securities from securities dealers, it is supplying them with cash, thereby increasing the money supply. When it sells securities, it is moving cash out of the system.

A Brief History of Central Banks

The first prototypes for modern central banks were the Bank of England and the Swedish Riksbank, which date back to the 17^th century. The Bank of England was the first to acknowledge the role of lender of last resort. Other early central banks, notably Napoleon’s Bank of France and Germany's Reichsbank, were established to finance expensive government military operations.

It was principally because European central banks made it easier for federal governments to grow, wage war, and enrich special interests that many of United States' founding fathers—most passionately Thomas Jefferson—opposed establishing such an entity in their new country. Despite these objections, the young country did have both official national banks and numerous state-chartered banks for the first decades of its existence, until a “free-banking period” was established between 1837 and 1863.

The National Banking Act of 1863 created a network of national banks and a single U.S. currency, with New York as the central reserve city. The United States subsequently experienced a series of bank panics in 1873, 1884, 1893, and 1907. In response, in 1913 the U.S. Congress established the Federal Reserve System and 12 regional Federal Reserve Banks throughout the country to stabilize financial activity and banking operations. The new Fed helped finance World War I and World War II by issuing Treasury bonds.

Between 1870 and 1914, when world currencies were pegged to the gold standard, maintaining price stability was a lot easier because the amount of gold available was limited. Consequently, monetary expansion could not occur simply from a political decision to print more money, so inflation was easier to control. The central bank at that time was primarily responsible for maintaining the convertibility of gold into currency; it issued notes based on a country's reserves of gold.

At the outbreak of World War I, the gold standard was abandoned, and it became apparent that, in times of crisis, governments facing budget deficits (because it costs money to wage war) and needing greater resources would order the printing of more money. As governments did so, they encountered inflation. After the war, many governments opted to go back to the gold standard to try to stabilize their economies. With this rose the awareness of the importance of the central bank's independence from any political party or administration.

During the unsettling times of the Great Depression in the 1930s and the aftermath of World War II, world governments predominantly favored a return to a central bank dependent on the political decision-making process. This view emerged mostly from the need to establish control over war-shattered economies; furthermore, newly independent nations opted to keep control over all aspects of their countries—a backlash against colonialism. The rise of managed economies in the Eastern Bloc was also responsible for increased government interference in the macro-economy. Eventually, however, the independence of the central bank from the government came back into fashion in Western economies and has prevailed as the optimal way to achieve a liberal and stable economic regime.

Central Bank Policy Example

The Great Recession of 2008-09 sparked fears of a similar period of prolonged deflation in the United States and elsewhere because of the catastrophic collapse in prices of a wide range of assets. The global financial system was also thrown into turmoil by the insolvency of a number of major banks and financial institutions throughout the United States and Europe, exemplified by the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008.

In response, in December 2008, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), the Federal Reserve's monetary policy body, turned to two main types of unconventional monetary policy tools: forward policy guidance and large-scale asset purchases, also known as quantitative easing (QE).

The former involved cutting the target federal funds rate essentially to zero and keeping it there at least through mid-2013. The latter, quantitative easing, essentially involved a central bank creating new money and using it to buy securities from the nation's banks so as to pump liquidity into the economy and drive down long-term interest rates. In this case, it allowed the Fed to purchase riskier assets, including mortgage-backed securities and other non-government debt.

This rippled through to other interest rates across the economy, and the broad decline in interest rates stimulated demand for loans from consumers and businesses. Banks were able to meet this higher demand for loans because of the funds they received from the central bank in exchange for their securities holdings.

The Bottom Line

A central bank is an institution that oversees a nation's monetary policy and money supply. Central banks often have a legal monopoly on the production and distribution of money. In times of downturn or high inflation, they may engage a range of monetary tools to stabilize the economy. The Federal Reserve is the central bank in the U.S.