Dallas Federal Reserve Bank

Annual Report Archive

It is not commonly known, but the Federal Reserve Banks are not actually a part of the U.S. Government. They are governmentally chartered institutions that are set up as a corporation, with stockholders, a board, and all the other accutrements that accompany a corporate charter. As with all other corporations, they are required to publish an annual report that outlines financials and other things of interest to the corporation for the past year. Of late, the Dallas Fed has also used its annual reports to publish essays that act as propaganda pieces to illustrate a point they believe to be of interest. Here, you'll find a complete archive of all the annual reports published to date. Note that during the years between 1935 and 1945 the Dallas Fed claims not to have published annual reports. I've been unable to locate any for this time period, though if anyone out there has a copy of one, I'd be interested in seeing it, and perhaps making it available here.

Unfortunately, they are all PDFs, which are not the easist thing to use and link to, but it's what we have.

Publications prior to 1958 are generally somewhat drier than more recent reports, as they are more factual statements of operations. They are interesting from an historical perspective though, because they are an interesting look into the economic situation of the country in the particular year of publication. Granted, there is a great deal of focus on the southwestern United States, but other regions obviously have impact and are reported on where it makes sense to do so.

It is also interesting to look at how the Fed, as an institution changed over the years. Particularly, you can see references in the very early reports of resistance in the country to the imposistion of the Federal Reserve system. It's also interesting to see some of the technological changes that occur through the course of history. I saw mention while skimming through about when bank routing numbers on checks were introduced, and why it was a good thing from the FED's perspective.

Note: The first Annual Report was for the year 1915. I am in the process of converting it to HTML. I have already done so for the 1916 report, as you can see below. I won't be doing so for the others, as it's just far too much work especially with the tables. However, from an historical point of view, I like the idea of being able to read them as html, rather than as just a PDF file.