This balancing is critical to ensuring accountability and reducing the risk that the institution would be captured by private or political interests. To understand how it came to be, it is useful to review a little history.
Just a few blocks from the Philadelphia Fed stand the vestiges of our country’s two earlier attempts at a central bank, dating back to the early years of our nation when Philadelphia was the major financial and political center of the country. The first institution was the brainchild of our first Treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton.