At its most recent meeting, the Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee cut interest rates – for the first time since 2020. You might be surprised at who it most benefits.

Immediately following the Fed’s very high profile and much anticipated half-point rate cut, the interest rates on two and 10-year Treasury bonds actually rose slightly. Meanwhile, the average rate on a 30-year fixed mortgage fell only marginally, from 6.09% to 6.08% the following week, reducing the monthly payment on a $300,000 loan by a whopping two dollars.

On the day of the Fed rate cut, LendingTree reported that the average credit card interest rate in America was 24.92%, the highest ever recorded.

This raises an important question: if the Fed cut interest rates, why aren’t borrowing costs declining significantly for consumers?

It is tempting to reach overly simplified conclusions about the effect of a rate cut on investing, saving and borrowing. But the reality is far more complex.

There are hundreds, if not thousands of different types of interest rates, each influenced by different factors and moving independently, although usually in the same general direction – at least in the long term. There is only one that the Federal Reserve explicitly controls. It’s something called the federal funds (or fed funds) rate.

The fed funds rate is the interest rate that banks charge each other for overnight loans. This year, the average daily balance of these overnight loans has been about $90 billion – a fraction of the $23.6 trillion of U.S. commercial bank assets.

That is, the Federal Reserve explicitly sets only one interest rate – and very, very few entities borrow money at that rate. And in a very strange irony, the bulk of the borrowing in the federal funds market is by foreign entities.

According to economists at the New York Fed, from at least 2016 until the beginning of this year, the primary borrowers in the fed funds market have been U.S. branches and agencies of foreign banks (FBO branches). As recently as a year ago (the most recent data in the report) foreign owned banks had borrowed almost ten times as much in fed funds as domestic institutions had borrowed.

There are very few people who clamor for higher interest rates. All else being equal, lower overall rates increase the intrinsic value of cash flow type assets, such as both stocks and bonds. But the Fed doesn’t control overall interest rates. It explicitly controls a single interest rate – and the biggest beneficiary of a cut in that rate isn’t you, unless you are a foreign owned bank.

David Moon is president of Moon Capital Management. A version of this piece originally appeared in the USA TODAY NETWORK.