FILE PHOTO: A sailboat makes its way along the Charles River in front of the skyline of Boston, Massachusetts, U.S., August 4, 2017. REUTERS/Brian Snyder
February 9, 2022
(Reuters) -The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston on Wednesday named University of Michigan provost Susan Collins as its next chief, making her the first Black woman to lead a regional Fed bank and delivering a measure of new diversity to U.S. central bank leadership.
Collins will start her job on July 1, the Boston Fed said in a statement. By then, the Fed is likely to have already begun to tighten monetary policy to fight high inflation, raising interest rates and perhaps also shrinking its balance sheet.
But Collins will be in place to weigh in on the Fed’s policy stance within weeks of starting, at its July 26-27 policy-setting meeting.
U.S. President Joe Biden earlier this year nominated three new Fed governors to the seven-member Fed Board in Washington, a group that would make the Fed’s top leadership the most diverse by race and gender in its 108-year history.
The U.S. Senate banking committee is slated to vote on their confirmation next week. Regional Fed presidents, unlike nominees to the Fed Board, do not need Senate confirmation
Collins would succeed longtime president Eric Rosengren, who left amid an ethics scandal over his and another Fed bank president’s personal trading during the pandemic. Philadelphia Fed President Patrick Harker will, following the Fed’s rules, continue to cast a vote for the Boston Fed until she takes the post.
Collins, who is also a professor of public policy and economics, is a well-known figure to monetary policymakers, frequently moderating at the Kansas City Fed’s annual Jackson Hole symposium.
Her academic work includes papers on emerging markets, exchange rates and trade. She served as a director at the Chicago Fed for nine years.
The Boston Fed is one of 12 regional Fed banks whose presidents, along with the members of the Fed Board, set U.S. monetary policy. Three of the other presidents are women, and two are nonwhite men.
Rosengren and Dallas Fed president Robert Kaplan resigned last fall after disclosures they conducted active trading – Rosengren in real estate securities and Kaplan in stocks – as the Fed undertook an aggressive rescue effort.
Fed Chair Jerome Powell has since overhauled Fed ethics rules to bar most active trading by senior Fed officials, and asked the central bank’s inspector general to launch an investigation into the trading, a probe that is currently ongoing.
(Reporting by Ann Saphir; Editing by Andrea Ricci)
Source: One America News Network
