Who owns the Fed?

Cullen Roche's blog Pragmatic Capitalism has an interesting and worthwhile post on "Who Owns the Federal Reserve?" It can be taken as a debunking of the notion that the Fed is privately owned, though Roche's description of the system as a "public-private hybrid" still seems to me to overstate the "private" aspect. The private ownership of the Fed's regional banks is nominal--it involves private-sector banks being required to buy shares that are not tradable; and the system's profits being (mostly) remitted to the Treasury--and the Fed's Board of Governors is a government agency by any standard. Still, Roche does a decent job of veering the conversation into reality and away from Brad Thor's Hidden Order: A Thriller, which I fact checked here.