Five Central Banks Can Draw Dollars At Will. No One Voted On The List.
The five foreign central banks entitled to unlimited Federal Reserve dollars were not chosen by any committee. A 2008 assessment scored eleven candidates on time zones, message formats and custody. The word 'ally' does not appear.
A months-long reporting project. Documents cited below are held in The Vault and available to readers.
NEW YORK, United States — Five foreign central banks can draw dollars from the Federal Reserve, in unlimited amounts, at their own initiative, without asking anybody's permission.
There is no application. There is no ceiling. The arrangement has been permanent since 31 October 2013, and the criteria for being on the list have never been published.
This newspaper obtained the working file behind that conversion: a precedent memorandum from 1962, an operational assessment of eleven candidate counterparties written in the autumn of 2008, and a two-page note that turned the temporary facilities into five standing ones. It took a fourteen-month request and one appeal.
The file contains no vote. Three former desk officers, on two continents, say there was never anything to vote on.
What the assessment scores
The 2008 assessment runs to eighty-two pages and marks the eleven candidates on four things.
Whether the counterparty already held an account at the New York desk. Whether its collateral sat with a custodian in a jurisdiction on which the Fed's own counsel had already written an opinion. Whether its dealing room was open for at least three hours that overlapped New York's morning. And whether it could send and receive settlement instructions in the message formats the desk used — without a translation layer, at two in the morning, on a Sunday.
The word "ally" does not appear in the eighty-two pages. Neither does "strategic". "Political" appears once, in a footnote about a national bank holiday in October.
Six of the eleven failed on the custodian question alone.
Seventy-four months of nothing
We also obtained drawing records at hourly resolution across three dollar squeezes. In all three, the first line opened was the Tokyo line, between twenty-one and forty-four minutes after Tokyo's own dollar funding rate crossed its threshold.
Four of the five lines have not been drawn on for seventy-four consecutive months. One of them has never been drawn on at all.
The fifth is used nearly every week.
Keiko Amemiya-Ruel, who worked a Tokyo money-market desk until 2019, explains it in a sentence: one Japanese commercial bank runs a dollar funding book larger than the entire balance sheet of most countries that are not on the list, and it funds that book short.
The facility imagined as a geopolitical instrument is, in most weeks, a plumbing fixture attached to one bank's maturity mismatch.
The two who asked to be left off
Two central banks widely assumed to have been kept off the list for political reasons asked, in writing, to be kept off it.
Both letters are in the file. Both make the same argument in different words: at home, a standing entitlement to draw foreign currency without limit would read as a foreign obligation; a foreign obligation requires an act of the legislature; and an act of the legislature requires a public debate about why the country cannot fund its own banks.
They wanted the line temporary, so that it could be described as an emergency measure if it ever had to be used.
Appendix C
The list itself has never been laid before anybody.
It is Appendix C to an operating circular. It is maintained by one deputy in an operations division, who declined an interview twice and answered eleven written questions through a press office. She has amended Appendix C four times in eleven years. Three of those four amendments corrected a telephone number.
What this desk takes from it
The nearest thing in our own vault to a founding document for any of this, PX-1455, has a man observing that an arrangement would be understood by bankers and misunderstood by everyone else, and that this was its chief merit. Nothing in the 2013 file is that knowing. The 2013 file is duller, and the dullness is the finding: an entitlement that decides which economies can survive a dollar shortage was assembled out of account numbers, custodians, opening hours and message formats, by people solving a settlement problem in a hurry.
Dr. Aurelio Banse-Ferreiro, who was a deputy governor of the bank the assessment calls Candidate 7, read this piece before publication and told us we have mistaken the plumbing for the ground it was laid in.
His reply is printed below, unedited. This desk has been unable to answer the middle of it.
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Sources & Method
We asked for the working file behind the 2013 conversion rather than for a policy explanation, on the theory that the explanation would be written afterwards and the file would not. It took fourteen months and an appeal. We then read the 2008 assessment against drawing records at hourly resolution, and put the whole of both to three former desk officers on two continents.
Who we spoke to
- The 2013 working file, A 1962 precedent memorandum, an eighty-two-page operational assessment of eleven candidate counterparties (2008), and the two-page note effecting the conversion. Requested under freedom of information; released in two tranches after fourteen months and one appeal, with counterparty pricing redacted Requested January 2025, released March and May 2026 The redactions are on price, not on identity. Every candidate is named in the assessment.
- Renaud Achterberg-Silva, Foreign exchange operations, a European central bank, 2006–2015. Interviewed by video call three times; read the 2008 assessment back to us line by line with the pages in front of him May–July 2026 Calls the assessment 'a procurement document with a flag on the cover'.
- Keiko Amemiya-Ruel, Money-market desk, a Tokyo dealer, until 2019. Interviewed in person in Tokyo twice, on the record after clearance from a former employer June 2026 Explains why one commercial bank's funding book moves the whole facility. Would not name the bank; we did not press her, and say so under Unverified.
- Drawing records at hourly resolution, three dollar squeezes, Which line opened first, and how long after the local funding rate crossed its threshold. Compiled from published operational releases and two supervisory returns released to us; the workbook is published with this story April–June 2026
- The deputy who maintains Appendix C, An operations division; named in her own institution's circular and not named here at her request. Declined an interview twice; answered eleven written questions through a press office July 2026 Confirmed the number of amendments and the reason for three of them. Would not confirm the fourth.
Documents
- PX-1455 — Minutes of an unnamed monetary conference, Jekyll Island, Georgia accepted
What we could not confirm
- Whether the 2008 assessment was the only one. It is the only one in the file we were given, and that file was assembled for a decision taken in 2013. If anybody scored the same eleven counterparties on other criteria in another year, that paper was not in the box, and we did not find it anywhere else.
- The seventy-four months. Our drawing count rests on operational releases published weekly and on two supervisory returns published daily. A small drawing taken and repaid inside a single week could sit underneath our data and never appear. Three former desk officers told us none has. None of them is now in a position to see the ledger.
- The identity of the Japanese bank whose funding book accounts for most of the drawing on the fifth line. Four people described the same institution to us in the same terms. Nobody would name it on the record, we could not confirm it from a filing, and we are not printing a name that rests on four descriptions.
How Others Covered This
The same events, as reported elsewhere on the same day. We list what each outlet had that we did not, as well as what we had that they did not — including where we come off worse. Why we print this.
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The Meridian TelegraphTHE LIST: THE FIVE COUNTRIES AMERICA HAS QUIETLY AGREED TO SAVE
Read the five as a security guarantee and every absence from the list as a punishment.
Had that we did not
The five, correctly, and the October 2013 date, both taken from our published file.
Left out
The two letters from candidates asking to be left off. They are in the same file, they are two pages each, and they were released to us at the same time.
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Signal & LedgerStanding Lines: Why Your Treasury Desk Should Read Appendix C
Treated it as an operational-risk note for corporate treasurers, and did that job better than we did.
Had that we did not
The message-format criterion, explained more clearly than we manage to explain it.
Left out
That four of the five lines have been dead for six years, which makes most of the risk they are pricing hypothetical.
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They Buriedthis newspaperFive Central Banks Can Draw Dollars At Will. No One Voted On The List.
Asked for the working file, waited fourteen months, and read the operational assessment instead of the politics.
Had that we did not
The 2008 assessment entire, the drawing records to the hour, and both letters from the candidates who declined.
Left out
Our headline says nobody voted, which is true and is the least interesting sentence in the file. We give nine paragraphs to how the list was made and one to what it does, and it took a former deputy governor to point that out to us. — V. Ashcombe-Doyle, standards editor
Right of Reply
They Buried contacted Dr. Aurelio Banse-Ferreiro, deputy governor until 2016 of the central bank the assessment calls Candidate 7 on 29 June 2026 with the full draft, the assessment, his own institution's 2011 letter and the drawing workbook, and four weeks to answer. Replied by email on 24 July 2026, asking that it run entire. Printed unedited.
You have written a careful piece and I want to tell you exactly where it goes soft, because you will not hear it from the people you usually ask.
Your finding is that the criteria were operational and not political. You then treat 'operational' as though it were a synonym for 'neutral'. It is not. It is a synonym for 'already built'.
Consider what your four criteria actually ask. Do you hold an account at that desk. Is your collateral with a custodian in a jurisdiction their counsel has already written on. Is your dealing room open in their morning. Can you send in their message format without a translation layer. Every one of those is a question about whether thirty years of institutional arrangement happened to point at New York. For my country it did not, and it did not because we were advised, repeatedly and by people with your passport, to build our arrangements elsewhere. You have discovered that the list is made of plumbing. I am telling you that somebody laid the pipes, and it was not us.
On our letter, which you print and which I signed. Yes, we asked to be left off. Read what that sentence contains. We asked because we knew what asking to be on would cost us at home: a debate in our legislature about why our own currency could not fund our own banks, conducted by people who would have been right to ask. A choice made in order to avoid a humiliation is a choice. It is not a preference, and your piece prints it as though we had been offered a seat and said we would rather stand.
And then there is the part you file under charm. One deputy maintains the list. Four amendments in eleven years, three of them a telephone number. You write this the way an English newspaper writes about a man who has kept a lighthouse for forty years.
I would put it differently. The register of which economies can survive a dollar shortage without asking anyone's permission is an appendix to an operating circular, maintained by a single official, never published, never laid before any legislature on earth, and amended four times in a decade by someone who is not required to explain any of the four. A rule nobody publishes is not a rule. It is a habit. Habits are how arrangements outlive the reasons for them, and they are extremely comfortable for whoever the habit already suits.
I do not say this to accuse anyone of a plot. Your file is right: there was no plot, there was a settlement problem and some sensible people solving it. My objection is that you seem to find this reassuring, and I find it the most alarming sentence in your newspaper this year.
One correction, since you asked for corrections. Our letter was dated 14 March 2011, not 11 March. The eleventh was the draft. I kept both.
Published unedited under our right-of-reply guarantee.
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