Boston Fed Taps Susan Collins As Its Next President

The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston said Wednesday that Susan M. Collins, an economist and administrator at the University of Michigan, will be its next president.

Collins will become the first black woman to lead one of the Federal Reserve’s 12 regional banks and the first black person to serve as president of the Boston Fed. Raphael Bostic, who has headed the Atlanta Fed since 2017, was the first black man appointed to the top spot at a regional Fed bank.

Collins has already been approved by the Fed’s governing board. She will have a voting seat on the Federal Reserve’s Federal Open Markets Committee, which makes interest rate targeting decisions.

The Fed is seen as having a challenging year ahead. It must balance its efforts to get inflation under control, which it will seek to do by raising interest rates and shrinking its balance sheet, with keeping employment high and not tipping the economy into a recession.

Collins replaces Eric Rosengren, who resigned in September after 14 years as president. Rosengren said he stepped down for health reasons. His resignation followed scrutiny from the Fed of investments he had made into real estate funds while the Fed was buying mortgage-backes securities in an effort to stabilize financial markets when the pandemic struck.

Dallas Fed President Robert Kaplan also stepped down after questions arose about his financial transactions and disclosures. His successor has not been named.

In addition to the Boston and Dallas Fed slots, the Fed board in Washington has three vacancies. President Joe Biden’s nominees Sarah Bloom Raskin, nominated for the position of vice-chair of supervision, and Lisa Cook, nominated to be a Fed governor have come under fire in recent days.

Raskin has been criticized for supporting the idea of using the Fed to push a left-wing climate change agenda and also for allegedly using her connections at the Fed to win favorable treatment for a company whose equity she held.

“Sarah Bloom Raskin, President Joe Biden’s latest Federal Reserve nominee, is a revolving-door lobbyist who used her access to get special treatment from the Fed for a company on whose board she sat. She thus made more than a million dollars for herself,” Tim Carney of the Washington Examiner wrote Tuesday.

Cook’s nomination has been challenged over her alleged lack of expertise in monetary policy, allegations that a key academic paper was badly flawed, and her alleged role in encouraging retaliation against a highly-respected University of Chicago economics professor who was fired by the Chicago Fed after criticizing advocates of defunding the police.

Harald Ulig, the economist targeted by Cook, wrote up his objections this week, concluding:

The Democratic Party is at pains to shed the memory of its loving embrace of the defund-the-police movement in the past.  Reasonable voices in that party have long realized that the endorsement of that movement is deeply unpopular and a sure way to lose elections in 2022 and beyond.  Inflation is now a very salient and considerable concern of the public.  Voters want to see senators appoint Fed Governors capable of addressing that first and foremost rather than issues outside the dual mandate of the Fed. Thus, if you are a Democratic Senator, why would you risk electing the weakly qualified candidate Lisa Cook and the baggage of issues she brings along?  There are many and much better choices.

Biden has also nominated Philip Jefferson, vice president for academic affairs and dean of faculty at Davidson in North Carolin, as a Fed governor. Cook and Jefferson, if confirmed, will be the fourth and fifth black governors on the board of the Federal Reserve.

Collins, who is 63, also taught at Georgetown University and was a senior staff economist on the White House Council of Economic Advisers under President George H.W. Bush. She graduated from Harvard College and earned a Ph.D. in economics from MIT.

“Dr. Collins brings the technical expertise and insight to contribute to policymaking and the leadership ability to head the organization,” said Christina Paxson, president of Brown University and chair of the Boston Fed’s Board of Directors, who led the search for a new president. “She is deeply committed to serving the public, engaging with constituents, and advancing economic stability, opportunity, and prosperity.”

–The Associated Press contributed to this report.