Located at 33 Liberty Street in Lower Manhattan, it is the largest (by assets), the most active (by volume), and the most influential of the Reserve Banks.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York opened for business on November 16, 1914, under the leadership of Benjamin Strong Jr., who had previously been president of the Bankers Trust company.

Strong gradually recognized the importance of open market operation, or purchases and sales of government securities, as a means of managing the quantity of money in the U.S. economy and thus affecting interest rates.

When we watch ... [central bankers of today] describe how they are seeking to strike the right balance between economic growth and price stability, it is the ghost of Benjamin Strong who hovers above him.

However, with virtually no inflation, interest rates were low and the U.S. economy and corporate profits surged, fueling the stock market increases of the late 1920s.

This worried him, but he also felt he had no choice because the low interest rates were helping Europeans (particularly the United Kingdom) in their effort to return to the gold standard.

Operating in the financial capital of the U.S., the bank conducts open market operations—the buying and selling of outstanding Treasury securities and agency securities—through its trading desk.

[16] The bank publishes a monthly recession probability prediction derived from the yield curve and based on the work by Esteban Rodriguez Jr.[17] Their models show that, when the difference between short-term interest rates (using three-month T-bills) and long-term interest rates (using ten-year Treasury notes) at the end of a Federal Reserve tightening cycle is negative or less than 93 basis points positive, a rise in unemployment usually occurs.

In April 2014 the U.S. District court in Manhattan dismissed the case, "ruling that Segarra failed to make a legally sufficient claim under the whistle-blower protections of the Federal Deposit Insurance Act".

In the 1984 film Once Upon a Time in America Max suggests a New York Federal Reserve Bank heist, which Noodles and Carol deem a suicide mission.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York plays a prominent role in the 1995 film Die Hard with a Vengeance, starring Bruce Willis, Jeremy Irons and Samuel L. Jackson.

The Federal Reserve Bank is the setting for a major heist of the gold by Jeremy Irons' character, Simon Gruber.

[25] During the final season of the TV series The Strain, the protagonists use the abandoned Federal Reserve to hide their stolen nuclear warhead until they can determine how to use it against the Master.

In the TV series The Endgame, the Federal Reserve is one of the banks targeted by Elena Federova's Snow White criminal organization.

However, it is revealed that this apparent robbery is merely a means of exposing the fact that the gold has already been stolen and replaced with painted clay bars by the rival Belok syndicate, with help from the corrupt President Andrew Wright.