The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, (informally referred to as the Atlanta Fed and the Bank), is the sixth district of the 12 Federal Reserve Banks of the United States and is headquartered in midtownAtlanta, Georgia.
In addition to supporting the U.S. financial system, the Atlanta Fed carries out the supervision and regulation of the banks operating within the sixth district. It also is a source of research and expertise for public and private decision makers within the district. In recent years, researchers within the Atlanta Fed have innovated new tools to gauge the health of the macro U.S. economy, the two most notable are GDPNow[3] and Wage Growth Tracker.[4]
The Atlanta Fed is currently led by Dr. Raphael Bostic, who was appointed in 2017[5] and is a member of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), the committee that makes key decisions about interest rates and the growth of the United States money supply.
Secondarily, the Atlanta Fed is a source of research and expertise for public and private decision makers within the district. Researchers within the Atlanta Fed have innovated new tools to gauge the health of the macro U.S. economy, the two most notable are GDPNow[7] Wage Growth Tracker.[4] The Atlanta Fed's GDPNow, which is a "nowcasting" model for gross domestic product (GDP) growth that synthesizes the related GDP subcomponents with monthly source data prior to the formal GDP release by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, is widely followed[8] by financial markets.
The Wage Growth Tracker is a measure of the nominal wage growth of individuals, using microdata from the Current Population Survey (CPS) from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Leadership
The bank is governed by a board of directors, which is drawn from the sixth district's business community, banks, and labor and consumer organizations, and makes recommendations every two weeks on the level of the discount rate, which is the rate at which the bank lends to commercial banks.
The bank's staff is led by Dr. Raphael Bostic, who was appointed in 2017[5] and is member of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC).
Governors and presidents
With the appointment of President Bostic in 2017, there have been 15 chief executive officers of the Atlanta Fed. The title of Reserve Bank chief executive officer was changed to president by the Banking Act of 1935.[9]