Fed Offices Swamped With Requests

It wasn’t calculated as a test of how much interest there is in interest rates, but in the 10 days since The Times’ Money Talk column directed readers to a free publication on interest rates offered by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Fed offices in Los Angeles and New York have been inundated with requests for the guide.

In the first hour after the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco’s Los Angeles office opened on the day the column was published, 40 callers requested copies of the booklet, “The Arithmetic of Interest Rates.” By lunch time, all 300 copies in stock in Los Angeles were gone. A week later, 10,000 orders had been placed.

To handle the requests, the Los Angeles office says it has hired two temporary workers, who are taking orders for the 6,000 additional copies that the office expects to receive within four weeks. Now, the local Fed office is asking people to obtain the booklet by writing to Public Information Department, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 33 Liberty St., New York, N.Y. 10045.

Why the overwhelming interest? The publication helps explain the ins and outs of interest on loans and investments, a subject of interest to hundreds of thousands of people. Specifically, it shows how to figure simple and compound interest and monthly payments on conventional home mortgages.

So it would be logical to assume that the vast majority of requests came from consumers. Not so, says a spokesman for the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. The biggest response for the interest-rate primer, he says, came from senior bankers.