Macroeconomic Impact

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Macroeconomic Impact

In order to achieve stability in the nation's economy, the creation of a centralized banking system was put into place to target double digit inflation. The Federal Reserve System was created 1913 with the hopes of increasing the supply of currency.

Monetary Policy

Monetary policy is the process by which the government, central bank or monetary authority manages the money supply to achieve specific goals. These goals include constraining inflation, maintaining an exchange rate, achieving full employment or economic growth (Monetary policy, Wikipedia). There are two forms of monetary policy, expansionary and contractionary policy. In expansionary policy, the Federal Reserve Bank ("Fed") is used to fight unemployment by lowering its interest rates and to increase the supply of money. In order to do this, the Fed will buy securities, lower the reserve ratio or lower the discount rate. Its purpose is to make bank loans less expensive and more available which increases the aggregate demand, output and employment. In contractionary policy, the Fed will try to reduce the aggregate demand by limiting the supply of money as well raising interest rates to fight inflation. The characteristics are opposite of expansionary policy. The Fed will sell securities, increase the reserve ratio and raise the discount rate. This is done to try to achieve the tightening of money in order to reduce spending and control inflation (McConnell & Brue, 2004, pp 11-12).

Federal Reserve

There are 12 regional Federal Reserve Banks in the United States, which were established by Congress to operate as the arms of the nation's central banking system. They are located in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Richmond, Atlanta, Chicago, St. Lois, Minneapolis, Kansas City, Dallas and San Francisco (Federal Reserve System).

The Federal Reserve currently has two legislated goals; they are price stability and full employment. In 1978, the Federal government was charged with promoting full employment and reasonable price stability by the Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act (Thorbecke, 2002, p. 255). One of the reasons in which the government should continue to give emphasis to full employment is that under the mandate, the U.S. has experienced low unemployment and low inflation. Secondly, the costs of unemployment are known to be considerable. Thirdly, central bankers tend to be inflation-averse and occasionally need to be prodded to pursue goals other than reducing inflation.

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