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Comment by brnt | Hacker News Reader

Can someone explain to non-Americans what the "Atlanta Fed" is? Fed is short for Federal Reserve, which sounds like it's not something that has local branches creating their own definitions. But apparently they do, so how does that work? How are they linked?

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A Federal Reserve Bank is a regional bank of the Federal Reserve System, the central banking system of the United States. There are twelve in total, one for each of the twelve Federal Reserve Districts that were created by the Federal Reserve Act of 1913.[1] The banks are jointly responsible for implementing the monetary policy set forth by the Federal Open Market Committee...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_Bank

There are twelve district Federal banks based on geographical districts.[0] The Atlanta Fed is short for The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.

The fed is not technically part of the federal government. There are the twelve privately chartered banks and a Board of Governors. Hope this helps!!

[0] https://www.federalreserve.gov/aboutthefed/structure-federal...

The Federal Reserve has a board of seven governors, and twelve regional banks (one in Atlanta). Along with that board, the president of the New York regional bank, and four others on a rotating basis, form the body that votes to set policy.

One of the specialties of the Federal Reserve Bank of Altanta is monitoring the economy, which may be why they're the ones to make this announcement. They have research tools and apps (GDPNow, EconomyNow) for viewing some statistics, forecasts, and model data about the economy.

https://www.atlantafed.org/cqer/research/gdpnow

https://www.atlantafed.org/apps/economynow.aspx

In keeping with the American commitment to federalism, the Federal Reserve system is comprised of regional member banks spread across the country. Rather than paraphrasing a Wikipedia entry, I'll just link it.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_Bank

The Federal Reserve is a semigovernmental entity that manages the US's monetary policy. It has a board of governors, appointed by the president, and 12 "districts," each of which has a bank associated with it.

Each Federal Reserve bank, in turn, has historically had some kind of monetary policy or financial specialty: most are chartered to advance monetary policy within the district they belong to, and many have special additional responsibilities (such as the NY Fed's storage of the US Treasury's gold reserves).

The TL;DR is that they're independent banking entities within the Federal Reserve system, which was designed to provide uniform central banking to the entire United States.

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