The Fed is also considering an action against a third man, a former Goldman executive who worked alongside the more junior banker who received the leaked material. Unlike Goldman, the former executive plans to fight the Fed if it files a case against him, the people briefed on the matter said.

The cases would reflect a broader effort at the Fed to address Wall Street misdeeds and ramp up its enforcement efforts against individual bankers. In 2015, the Fed chose to bar six bankers from the industry, twice the number in 2014. The year before that, the Fed did not take any such actions.

But for the Fed, the circumstances of the looming Goldman actions are both unlikely and awkward.

The leak, after all, originated at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York with one of its own employees. And the junior Goldman banker who received the confidential information was a former New York Fed employee himself, illustrating the perils of the proverbial revolving door between government and Wall Street. The banker came to Goldman with a job reference from a New York Fed official.

The Fed’s board in Washington, a unit that operates separately from the New York Fed, is pursuing Goldman and the former executive.

These actions would not be the Fed’s first to stem from the leak. After the leak provided Goldman a window into the Fed’s private insights about regulatory matters, the New York Fed fired its employee and notified law enforcement agencies, saying at the time it was “resolute to learn from our experiences.”