Federal Reserve in the context of "Ron Paul"

The New Deal was a series of wide-reaching economic, social, and political reforms enacted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States between 1933 and 1938, in response to the Great Depression, which had started in 1929. Roosevelt introduced the phrase upon accepting the Democratic Party's presidential nomination in 1932 before winning the election in a landslide over incumbent Herbert Hoover, whose administration was viewed by many as doing too little to help those affected. Roosevelt believed that the depression was caused by inherent market instability and too little demand per the Keynesian model of economics and that massive government intervention was necessary to stabilize and rationalize the economy.

During Roosevelt's first hundred days in office in 1933 until 1935, FDR introduced what historians refer to as the "First New Deal", which focused on the "3 R's": relief for the unemployed and for the poor, recovery of the economy back to normal levels, and reforms of the financial system to prevent a repeat depression. Roosevelt signed the Emergency Banking Act, which authorized the Federal Reserve to insure deposits to restore confidence, and the 1933 Banking Act made this permanent with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). Other laws created the National Recovery Administration (NRA), which allowed industries to create "codes of fair competition"; the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which protected investors from abusive stock market practices; and the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), which raised rural incomes by controlling production. Public works were undertaken in order to find jobs for the unemployed (25 percent of the workforce when Roosevelt took office): the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) enlisted young men for manual labor on government land, and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) promoted electricity generation and other forms of economic development in the drainage basin of the Tennessee River.

Milton Friedman (/ˈfriːdmən/ ; July 31, 1912 – November 16, 2006) was an American economist and statistician who received the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his research on consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and the complexity of stabilization policy. With George Stigler, Friedman was among the intellectual leaders of the Chicago school of economics, a neoclassical school of economic thought associated with the faculty at the University of Chicago that rejected Keynesianism in favor of monetarism before shifting their focus to new classical macroeconomics in the mid-1970s. Several students, young professors and academics who were recruited or mentored by Friedman at Chicago went on to become leading economists, including Gary Becker (Nobel Prize 1992), Robert Fogel (Nobel Prize 1993), and Robert Lucas Jr. (Nobel Prize 1995).

Friedman's challenges to what he called "naive Keynesian theory" began with his interpretation of consumption, which tracks how consumers spend. He introduced a theory which would later become part of mainstream economics and he was among the first to propagate the theory of consumption smoothing. During the 1960s, he became the main advocate opposing both Marxist and Keynesian government and economic policies, and described his approach (along with mainstream economics) as using "Keynesian language and apparatus" yet rejecting its initial conclusions. He theorized that there existed a natural rate of unemployment and argued that unemployment below this rate would cause inflation to accelerate. He argued that the Phillips curve was in the long run vertical at the "natural rate" and predicted what would come to be known as stagflation. Friedman promoted a macroeconomic viewpoint known as monetarism and argued that a steady, small expansion of the money supply was the preferred policy, as compared to rapid and unexpected changes. His ideas concerning monetary policy, taxation, privatization, and deregulation influenced government policies, especially during the 1980s. His monetary theory influenced the Federal Reserve's monetary policy in response to the 2008 financial crisis.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, located in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in the United States, covers the 9th District of the Federal Reserve, which is made up of Minnesota, Montana, North and South Dakota, northwestern Wisconsin, and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Although its geographical territory is the third largest of the 12 Federal Reserve banks, it serves the smallest population base of the system. It has one branch, which is in Helena, Montana.

Credit Suisse Group AG (French pronunciation: [kʁe.di sɥis], lit. 'Swiss Credit') was a global investment bank and financial services firm founded and based in Switzerland. According to UBS, eventually Credit Suisse was to be fully integrated into UBS. While the integration was yet to be completed, both banks are operating separately. However, on May 31, 2024, it was announced that Credit Suisse ceased to exist. Headquartered in Zürich, as a standalone firm, it maintained offices in all major financial centres around the world and provided services in investment banking, private banking, asset management, and shared services. It was known for strict bank–client confidentiality and banking secrecy. The Financial Stability Board considered it to be a global systemically important bank. Credit Suisse was also a primary dealer and Forex counterparty of the Federal Reserve in the United States.

Credit Suisse was founded in 1856 to fund the development of Switzerland's rail system. It issued loans that helped create Switzerland's electrical grid and the European rail system. In the 1900s, it began shifting to retail banking in response to the elevation of the middle class and competition from fellow Swiss banks UBS and Julius Bär. Credit Suisse partnered with First Boston in 1978 before buying a controlling share of the bank in 1988. From 1990 to 2000, the company purchased institutions such as Winterthur Group, Swiss Volksbank, Swiss American Securities Inc. (SASI), and Bank Leu.

The 2008 financial crisis, also known as the global financial crisis (GFC) or the Panic of 2008, was a major worldwide financial crisis centered in the United States. The causes included excessive speculation on property values by both homeowners and financial institutions, leading to the 2000s United States housing bubble. This was exacerbated by predatory lending for subprime mortgages and by deficiencies in regulation. Cash out refinancings had fueled an increase in consumption that could no longer be sustained when home prices declined. The first phase of the crisis was the subprime mortgage crisis, which began in early 2007, as mortgage-backed securities (MBS) tied to U.S. real estate, and a vast web of derivatives linked to those MBS, collapsed in value. A liquidity crisis spread to global institutions by mid-2007 and climaxed with the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, which triggered a stock market crash and bank runs in several countries. The crisis exacerbated the Great Recession, a global recession that began in mid-2007, as well as the United States bear market of 2007–2009. It was also a contributor to the 2008–2011 Icelandic financial crisis and the euro area crisis.

During the 1990s, the U.S. Congress had passed legislation that intended to expand affordable housing through looser financing rules, and in 1999, parts of the 1933 Banking Act (Glass–Steagall Act) were repealed, enabling institutions to mix low-risk operations, such as commercial banking and insurance, with higher-risk operations such as investment banking and proprietary trading. As the Federal Reserve ("Fed") lowered the federal funds rate from 2000 to 2003, institutions increasingly targeted low-income homebuyers, largely belonging to racial minorities, with high-risk loans; this development went unattended by regulators. As interest rates rose from 2004 to 2006, the cost of mortgages rose and the demand for housing fell; in early 2007, as more U.S. subprime mortgage holders began defaulting on their repayments, lenders went bankrupt, culminating in the bankruptcy of New Century Financial in April. As demand and prices continued to fall, the financial contagion spread to global credit markets by August 2007, and central banks began injecting liquidity. In March 2008, Bear Stearns, the fifth-largest U.S. investment bank, was sold to JPMorgan Chase in a "fire sale" backed by Fed financing.

The inequality of wealth (i.e., inequality in the distribution of assets) has substantially increased in the United States since the late 1980s. Wealth commonly includes the values of any homes, automobiles, personal valuables, businesses, savings, and investments, as well as any associated debts.

Although different from income inequality, the two are related. Wealth is usually not used for daily expenditures or factored into household budgets, but combined with income, it represents a family's total opportunity to secure stature and a meaningful standard of living, or to pass their class status down to their children. Moreover, wealth provides for both short- and long-term financial security, bestows social prestige, contributes to political power, and can be leveraged to obtain more wealth. Hence, wealth provides mobility and agency—the ability to act. The accumulation of wealth enables a variety of freedoms, and removes limits on life that one might otherwise face.

The Emergency Banking Relief Act (E.B.R.A.) (Pub. L. 73–1, 48 Stat. 1, enacted March 9, 1933) was an act passed by the United States Congress in March 1933 in an attempt to stabilize the banking system.

The act authorized the Federal Reserve to issue additional currency to banks that were deemed solvent without the requirement that these reserves be backed by gold. One month following the passage of this act, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 6102 criminalizing the possession of monetary gold by any individual, partnership, association or corporation.

Price stability is a goal of monetary and fiscal policy aiming to support sustainable rates of economic activity. Policy is set to maintain a very low rate of inflation or deflation. For example, the European Central Bank (ECB) describes price stability as a year-on-year increase in the Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices (HICP) for the Euro area of below 2%. However, by referring to "an increase in the HICP of below 2%" the ECB makes clear that not only persistent inflation above 2% but also deflation (i.e. a persistent decrease of the general price level) are inconsistent with the goal of price stability.

In the United States, the Federal Reserve Act (as amended in 1977) directs the Federal Reserve to pursue policies promoting "maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates". The Fed long ago determined that the best way to meet those mandates is to target a rate of inflation of around 2%; in 2011 it officially adopted a 2% annual increase in the personal consumption expenditures price index (often called PCE inflation) as the target. Since the mid-trend 1990s, the Federal Reserve's measure of the inflation trend averaged 1.7%, a mere 0.3% shy of the Federal Open Market Committee’s 2% target for overall PCE inflation. Trend inflation as measured by the price index of core personal consumption expenditures (PCE) – that is, excluding food and energy – has fluctuated between 1.2% and 2.3% over the past 20 years.