Authors
Dear Friend,
We’re pleased to share with you the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis’ 2020 Annual Report. Our theme for the year is “resilience.” As an organization, we persevered through a global pandemic and resulting economic crisis, and we renewed our commitment to dismantling structural racism. This work was a partnership between our board of directors, our incredible leadership team, and more than 1,100 dedicated staff members.
We represent the Ninth Federal Reserve District, which includes Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, western Wisconsin, and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and our mission is to pursue an economy that works for everyone.
When COVID-19 struck, the Minneapolis Fed quickly forged new partnerships with some of the world’s leading epidemiologists, because we knew that we couldn’t understand the path of the economy if we didn’t understand the path of the virus. Through outreach and research, we tracked the economic impact of the pandemic across our region and on women, on small businesses, and in Indian Country.
We shared our research and analysis broadly to give our communities and policymakers tools to evaluate the economic impact of the pandemic. As part of the Federal Reserve System, we took unprecedented actions to support the regional and U.S. economies, including leading the lending facility that supported the Paycheck Protection Program with nearly $112 billion of loans to small businesses in 2020.
Among our policy initiatives, to close our unconscionable education gaps and position the state for future economic success, we partnered with former Minnesota Supreme Court Justice Alan Page to advance a constitutional amendment to guarantee every Minnesota child a right to a quality public education. To promote transparency about the health of large banks during the pandemic, we developed an interactive stress test tool and convened experts to weigh in on it.
George Floyd’s death, just miles from our headquarters in downtown Minneapolis, galvanized our commitment to addressing racism. We convened other Federal Reserve Banks and launched a groundbreaking series, Racism and the Economy, to confront the effects of systemic racism in our economy. Our goal for these events is to invite candid dialogue and achieve meaningful action and policy change, not just talk. The series is continuing in 2021, and we invite you to join.
Our Opportunity & Inclusive Growth Institute expanded and launched a new magazine, For All, aimed at sharing its research and insights with policymakers and opinion leaders, like you, nationwide. We invite you to sign up for your free subscription.
Within the Bank, we continue to make progress on diversity and inclusion, led by our Office of Minority and Women Inclusion (OMWI). We are proud to have been recognized in the Hispanic Association on Corporate Responsibility’s Corporate Inclusion Index and to have achieved a 100 percent rating on the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index. You can see our progress in our 2020 OMWI Report to Congress.
And, through these challenges, we were able to deliver excellence in our core responsibilities: setting monetary policy for the nation; providing financial services to banks, credit unions, and savings and loan institutions; regulating and supervising banks throughout the region; processing savings bonds on behalf of the U.S. Treasury; and improving our payments system.
We pride ourselves on being good stewards of our resources. We have an independent audit completed each year and, while we receive no funding from Congress, any Federal Reserve funds remaining at the end of the year are contributed to taxpayers via the U.S. Treasury. This year, that amount totaled $88.5 billion. Review our financials here.
We want to thank you, our colleagues, and our community partners for your engagement with our work and support for our mission.
Best,
Sri Zaheer
Chair, Board of Directors
Neel Kashkari
President
