Central Banks meetings calendar 2024

Central Banks are the financial institutions that control a country’s monetary policy. Usually, they have several mandates including, but not limited to issuing national currency, maintaining the value of the currency, ensuring financial system stability, controlling credit supply, serving as a last-resort lender to other banks and acting as the government’s banker.

The central bank might or might not be independent of the government. In theory, an independent central bank will ensure there is no political influence over the central banks’ policy, however, even with the so-called “independent central banks,” this is not always the case.

Some of the well-known central banks are the US Federal Reserve (Fed), Bank of Canada (BoC), European Central Bank (ECB), Bank of England (BoE), Switzerland National Bank (SNB), Bank of Japan (BoJ), Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA), and Reserve Bank of New Zealand (RBNZ). Some central banks are responsible for a single’s country monetary policy, for example, the Bank of Canada, while others manage the monetary policy of a group of countries like the European Central Bank.

Central banks manage their countries' monetary policies, which include currency issuing, maintaining the country’s foreign exchange and gold reserves, managing the money supply and managing the cost of credit by setting interest rates. The monetary policy enforced by a central bank is used in general to influence economic activity (avoid recessions, facilitate economic growth, etc.) and control inflation.

One of the most powerful weapons in the central banks’ arsenal is the short-term interest rate setting. The short-term interest rate is the overnight interbank lending rate. Lowering the short-term interest rate in effect lowers the cost of credit, thus stimulating people and businesses to borrow in the hopes of expanding the economy. Increasing interest rates makes borrowing more expensive, and it is usually used to control overheating economies and inflation.

Below you can download the meetings scheduled for 2024 of the world’s leading central banks in two versions. The PDF file with the meetings scheduled for each central bank, and the pdf file with the calendar month by month of the meetings scheduled. Usually, meetings last for two days. These are reported in the PDF files only on the second day, in which decisions on the monetary policy are communicated.