No, your one vote won't change everything to suit your personal preferences, and if you wanted to change the way some aspect of our system works (like money, or health care, or drug policy, or whatever) it'd be a lot of work, consensus-building, and time. But, at least the power is in our hands, collectively.
After paying a dividend to its stockholders (commercial banks).
"Who owns the Federal Reserve?
The Federal Reserve System fulfills its public mission as an independent entity within government. It is not "owned" by anyone and is not a private, profit-making institution."
...and, it goes on from there...
>However, owning Reserve Bank stock is quite different from owning stock in a private company. The Reserve Banks are not operated for profit, and ownership of a certain amount of stock is, by law, a condition of membership in the System. The stock may not be sold, traded, or pledged as security for a loan; dividends are, by law, paid to member banks at a maximum rate of 6 percent, determined in part by each member bank's total assets.
The bank is operated "not for profit", but generates $9x billion in "profit" for the Treasury (as claimed multiple times in this thread).
"Ownership" is a moot red herring. Owning a fictional entity is useless; having claims on its cash flows is not. The Federal Reserve System issues stock to commercial banks and pays an annual dividend to them, before any money goes to the Treasury. It is literally all of the upside with none of the downside (e.g. liability). The investment pays for itself in twelve years and then continues to pay in perpetuity.
The Fed chair is appointed by the government, and profits are returned to the US Treasury. It's independent insofar as the government doesn't have direct control. But they do have oversight, and could legislate it out of existence tomorrow.
Well, Yellen recently said something along the lines of 'being part of the team' and Bernanke claimed something similar in his book or talks iirc ( sorry, no references atm ). The whole independent claim is just smoke and mirrors.
I have never come to a particularly clear or detailed position on monetary policy and so I don't know how good or bad a job of it I think the Fed has been doing from my perspective, nor would I assume that Bitcoin or any altcoin is doing a better job. But it makes some sense to me that someone could say "I wish I could use money that wasn't subject to the Fed, because I so often disagree with the Fed".
I've seen some arguments about this that devolved into elaborate discussions about the institutional status and control of the Fed (as this thread might be in danger of doing...), but I've sometimes seen arguments that went in a different direction, where people suggested that it's important for the Fed to be able to set monetary policy for the money primarily used in the U.S., because monetary policy ought to be subject to political control, because it achieves important political objectives.
I tend to suspect that some form of that is ultimately the issue in play at the bottom of some of these discussions: how subject to politics should or must monetary policy be, and how legitimate or illegitimate is it for people to try to use, on a significant scale, money whose supply and interest rate aren't determined by the central bank of the country they live in?
