central bank

The Monetary Policy Committee set the key rate at 0.5% for the 26th month and left its bond-purchase program at 200 billion pounds.

Policy makers are under pressure to curb inflation that has soared to more than twice the central bank's 2% target. Economists expect the ECB will announce its first rate increase since July 2008 later today.

The Bank of England kept its benchmark interest rate at a record low as policy makers focus on the need to aid recovery, according to a Bloomberg report.

The People's Bank of China, the central bank of the People's Republic of China, raised its benchmark 1-year lending rate by a quarter point to 6.31%, and its rate on one-year bank deposits to 3.25%.

Finding out the exact names and numbers will take some time, as the Fed released 894 individual PDF files totaling over 25,000 pages.

The lending peaked at $111 billion on October 29th, 2008, as credit markets nearly froze in the wake of the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers.

In the Fed's nearly 100-year history, the central bank has never before released data relating to the discount window.

The Federal Reserve disclosed today which banks borrowed from its discount window and how much, during the period from August of 2007 to March of 2010.

The bank returned $79 billion to the U.S. Treasury, a 68% increase over 2009.

The Federal Reserve profited $81.7 billion in 2010, a record high, up from $53.4 billion in 2009.