The Federal Reserve
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50 free The Federal Reserve trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The Federal Reserve sets the price of money for the world's largest economy, yet most Americans could not say who owns it, who runs it, or why it is neither fully public nor fully private. It grew out of a banking panic and a secret meeting, and people have argued about it ever since. This quiz covers what an economics or civics class expects you to know, and a good deal that the textbook leaves out: how the system is organized, where its regional banks sit, what its policy tools do, and which chairs tamed inflation or fought a financial crisis. There are multiple choice questions on the history, the jargon and the people, each with an answer and a short explanation. It suits students revising for a test on monetary policy, teachers who want a ready-made review, and anyone who has watched a rate decision on the news and wondered what had just happened.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Each Federal Reserve Bank issues stock that cannot be sold or traded: who is required by law to hold it?
Its member banks
Its member banks must buy the stock as a condition of joining, but the shares bring none of the usual control, and nearly all of the profit is handed to the US Treasury.
Q 02Which is the only US state that is home to the headquarters of two regional Federal Reserve Banks?
Missouri
Missouri won two of the banks in 1914, and critics at the time linked the choice to the number of Missouri politicians then in office.
Q 03Which Federal Reserve Bank guards the world's largest known gold vault, 80 feet below street level?
New York
New York keeps the bullion on Manhattan's bedrock, and almost all of it belongs to foreign central banks rather than to the United States.
Q 04Which Fed chair, the subject of Bob Woodward's book Maestro, held the job from 1987 to 2006?
Alan Greenspan
Alan Greenspan studied clarinet at the Juilliard School and played saxophone before he turned to economics.
Q 05On a US one-dollar bill, the letter in the black seal beside Washington's portrait identifies what?
The bank that issued it
The bank that issued it is one of the regional Reserve Banks, named in the seal on $1 and $2 bills, while larger notes carry a letter-and-number code instead.
Q 06In Fed-watching slang, which bird names an official who favors higher interest rates to keep inflation low?
Hawk
Hawk is the label for inflation fighters, doves put jobs first, and a centrist who sits between the two camps has been called a monetary pigeon.
Q 07Which president killed the Second Bank of the United States, a forerunner of the Fed, with an 1832 veto?
Andrew Jackson
Andrew Jackson then pulled the federal deposits out of the bank, and the United States went without a central bank until the Fed opened in 1914.
Q 08Who in 2014 became the first woman to chair the Federal Reserve, and later the first to run the Treasury?
Janet Yellen
Janet Yellen is also the first person to have led all three of Washington's top economic bodies: the Fed, the Treasury and the White House Council of Economic Advisers.
Q 09Which towering Fed chair pushed interest rates to 20% in 1981 to crush double-digit inflation?
Paul Volcker
Paul Volcker stood 6 feet 7 inches, and his rate rises hurt so much that homebuilders mailed the Fed lengths of two-by-four lumber in protest.
Q 10Which president signed the Federal Reserve Act into law in December 1913, two days before Christmas?
Woodrow Wilson
Woodrow Wilson made the bill part of his New Freedom agenda and sought a middle ground between progressives and conservative Republicans.
Q 11Who led the Fed during the 2008 financial crisis and later shared a Nobel Prize for research on banks?
Ben Bernanke
Ben Bernanke had made his name as a Princeton professor studying the Great Depression, and Time named him Person of the Year for 2009.
Q 12Which lawyer and former Carlyle Group partner chaired the Fed through the COVID-19 pandemic?
Jerome Powell
Jerome Powell was put on the Fed's board by Barack Obama, promoted to chair by Donald Trump and renominated by Joe Biden.
Q 13Which financier organized the rescue that ended the Panic of 1907, when America had no central bank?
J. P. Morgan
Q 21What name is given to the interest charged when a commercial bank borrows directly from the Federal Reserve?
The discount rate
The discount rate was once set below market levels, so the Fed discouraged its use, and a stigma grew up around any bank seen borrowing at the window.
Q 22Which long-standing rule, once a core tool of monetary policy, did the Fed cut to zero in March 2020?
Reserve requirements
Reserve requirements had obliged banks to hold back a fraction of their customers' deposits, until the Fed scrapped them for every depository institution on March 26, 2020.
Q 23What name is given to a central bank buying financial assets on a huge scale, as the Fed did from 2008?
J. P. Morgan pledged large sums of his own money and pressed other bankers to do the same, and the scare set Congress on the road to creating the Fed.
Q 14On which Georgia island did Senator Nelson Aldrich and top financiers secretly plan a central bank in 1910?
Jekyll
Jekyll Island's guests denied the meeting for twenty years, until a 1930 biography of Aldrich confirmed it, long after their plan had shaped the Federal Reserve Act.
Q 15Into how many districts, each with its own regional Reserve Bank, is the Federal Reserve System divided?
12
12 was the legal ceiling: the 1913 act allowed as few as eight districts, and the organizers chose the most it permitted.
Q 16Congress gave the Fed a dual mandate: stable prices and which other goal?
Maximum employment
Maximum employment was written into the Fed's goals only by a 1977 reform law, more than sixty years after the central bank first opened its doors.
Q 17What annual inflation rate has the Fed officially aimed for since adopting an explicit goal in 2012?
2%
2% has become the usual goal in rich economies, an approach pioneered in 1990 by New Zealand, where the first agreed range ran from zero up to that figure.
Q 18Alaska and Hawaii both fall within the district of the Federal Reserve Bank based in which city?
San Francisco
San Francisco runs the largest district by both area and population, covering nine western states and more than a third of the country's area.
Q 19Nominees to the Federal Reserve's seven-seat board are chosen by the White House and confirmed by which body?
The Senate
The Senate has a say over the top job too: the chair is picked from among those already sitting on the board, for a four-year term that can be renewed.
Q 20Which benchmark, charged when US banks lend to one another overnight, is the Fed's main policy target?
The federal funds rate
The federal funds rate is steered by a committee that normally meets eight times a year, and it influences a wide range of other borrowing costs across the economy.
Quantitative easing
Quantitative easing began in Japan, and the term dates from 1995, more than a decade before America tried the policy on a grand scale.
Q 24Which phrase describes a central bank's duty to supply emergency cash to sound banks during a panic?
Lender of last resort
Lender of last resort is traced to Sir Francis Baring, a London banker writing in 1797, more than a century before America built a central bank to play the part.
Q 25Which Fed report on regional business conditions, issued eight times a year, is named for its cover color?
The Beige Book
The Beige Book was the Red Book until it went public in 1983, when the Fed changed the cover to a duller shade to play down its importance.
Q 26In classic open market operations, a central bank such as the Fed mainly buys and sells which assets?
Government securities
Government securities are bought with newly created money, which swells the balances that commercial banks hold at the Fed and pushes borrowing costs down.
Q 27Which Rocky Mountain state has hosted the Fed's annual symposium for the world's central bankers since the early 1980s?
Wyoming
Wyoming's Grand Teton National Park was chosen partly to lure the Fed chairman of the day, an avid angler who enjoyed the fly fishing there.
Q 28Which Treasury secretary championed the First Bank of the United States, chartered by Congress in 1791?
Alexander Hamilton
Alexander Hamilton won his bank over the objections of Thomas Jefferson, but its charter ran for only twenty years and expired in 1811.
Q 29Which term describes frightened depositors all withdrawing at once, the panic the Fed was founded to stop?
A bank run
A bank run can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, because every withdrawal makes failure more likely and so prompts more people to pull their cash.
Q 30Which Virginia congressman, later co-author of a famous 1933 banking law, sponsored the Federal Reserve Act?
Carter Glass
Carter Glass later ran the Treasury under the president who signed the act, and the 1933 Glass–Steagall Act he co-wrote split investment banks from commercial ones.