Coyne completes first year as Fed branch director

By: 
Nathan Oster

When it designed the Federal Reserve System more than a century ago, Congress envisioned it being representative of public and private institutions and benefiting from a free flow of information from private citizens who had boots on the ground in communities across the country.

For the past year, John Coyne III has provided one of those voices.  The chairman, chief executive officer and president of Big Horn Federal Savings Bank, Coyne joined the Fed’s Denver Branch Board of Directors on Jan. 1, 2023 and is one year into his three-year term.

There are 12 regional Federal Reserve Banks in the U.S., and the Denver Branch is in the 10th District. Headquartered in Kansas City, it’s the largest of the 12 districts and encompasses Colorado, Kansas, western Missouri, Nebraska, northern New Mexico, Oklahoma and Wyoming.

Coyne has made frequent trips to Denver in the past year. The board meets nine times annually and members take turns appearing in front of the regional directors in Kansas City.  Coyne expects to make that trip twice this year.

“Probably the best thing about it, thus far, has been seeing that the process, as it was intended, works really well,” he said. “We’ve seen commentary that’s come out of our region be picked up by the policymakers, who use it to help them craft better decisions.

“That’s been really encouraging, seeing all the work being done on the backside being utilized.” 

Coyne said his other key takeaway from the past year has been “seeing how dedicated these people are to the mission. That’s been exciting.  People think it’s just D.C. bureaucrats doing D.C. bureaucrat things. If that exists, it’s not embedded in the Federal Reserve System. People are passionate about serving and that comes through in many ways.”

Coyne said he and the other directors contribute observations about the general economic health of their areas and how businesses have been impacted by interest rate changes by the Federal Reserve Board. He said his experiences in the past year have given him even more faith in the system that Congress envisioned more than a century ago.

“Our banking model is so different than any other country in the world,” he said. “We still have independent banks who are part of a bigger system but aren’t all centralized. There’s no government control. There’s independent decision-making taking place at all those banks across the United States.

“There is a hierarchy of oversight that exists, of course, but we have the ability to serve our customers the way they need to be served instead of having somebody influencing us beyond that.  The Federal Reserve System is the catalyst to ensure consistency across all of those organizations in the distribution of the currency and the management of the policy, and that, I think, is one of the cool takeaways of why the U.S. economy is light years ahead of anything else in the world.”

 

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