Although its top officers take a federal oath, they are not appointed by the President of the United States, or even by the Federal Reserve Board, but are elected by the bank’s own board of directors, and their salaries are paid not out of the federal till but out of the bank’s own income. Yet that income—though, happily, always forthcoming—is entirely incidental to the bank’s purpose, and if it rises above expenses and dividends the excess is automatically paid into the United States Treasury. A bank that considers profits incidental is scarcely the norm in Wall Street, and this attitude puts
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