FOMC / Rate-Setting Board

The US Federal Reserve seats a 7-member rate-setting committee, the FOMC. The chair still proposes policy. The committee has to agree. It is the Fed's institution alone: every other central bank keeps its single-governor or government-controlled model, so the Bank of England, the Bundesbank or ECB, the Bank of Japan and the rest can have their rate set or legislated by their own governments and parliaments as before. Command economies keep a passive monobank. See Central Banks for scrutiny, regimes, and the prime rate's economic effects.

Board#

• 7 seats, chair included. Odd on purpose so majorities are clean.
• Seat 1 is the chair seat.
• Occupants are players, NPPs, or vacant. Vacant seats do not count toward motion votes.
• Terms are 192 turns (4 game years), staggered so the whole board does not open at once.
• The engine does not staff the board. When a governor's or the chair's term runs out, the seat falls vacant and waits for the President to nominate a successor and the Senate to confirm them. The chair seat is never auto-appointed either.

Vacant seats#

A motion needs a strict majority of seated governors to pass. Vacant seats do not count, while seated governors without a ballot abstain. The committee can open meetings whenever at least one governor is seated. If no governors are seated, meetings pause and the chair sets the rate directly using the ordinary central-bank chair controls on the Overview page, bound by the usual cooldown and per-change size limits. Meetings resume once a governor is confirmed.

For a player chair, direct control appears as the normal Prime Rate adjuster. For an autonomous (NPP) chair, the Taylor-rule auto-setter takes over, exactly as for any single-governor bank.

Nominations#

The President nominates a chair or governor; the nomination appears in a Senate confirmations panel on the FOMC committee page with the nominee, the seat, whether they are a player or an NPP, the running tally and the closing time. Sitting Senators cast For, Against or Abstain there, and confirmation is decided by those votes. See Confirmation Process.

Meetings#

Meetings open every 8 turns (6 per game year) when the board is due.

The chair proposes hike, cut, or hold, with a signed rate delta (0 for a hold). Player seats get a 24-hour / 24-turn window to ballot. A no-show is an abstain. NPP seats auto-vote from the same rule the autonomous chair uses, tilted hawk or dove, when the meeting opens, but the motion is not resolved until the window closes, so the chair and seated members always get their vote before it carries.

A motion passes on a strict majority of seated governors. Vacancies do not count; seated governors without a ballot abstain, so the committee is biased toward holding when members do not vote.

Rate-change cap#

Executed hikes and cuts (not holds) are capped at 16 per term. After that the board can still meet and hold.

Rate changes also obey the chair's usual cooldown and size limits; see Central Banks.

Chair selection#

When the chair's term expires the seat falls vacant. The President nominates and the Senate confirms, as above; there is no draw, no lobbying pool and no machine candidate. Central banks outside the United States keep the governor-selection model described on Central Banks.

See also: Central Banks, National Metrics, Currency Exchange.