The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas has named Robert Steven Kaplan, a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. executive who left to teach at Harvard in 2006, as its new president.
Kaplan, 58, will take his post Sept. 8, the Dallas Fed said Monday in a press release. He will replace Richard Fisher, who was president from April 2005 to March 2015. Helen Holcomb, the Dallas Fed’s first vice president, has served as interim head since Fisher retired.
The new president, who won’t vote on policy until 2017, is joining the Fed at a pivotal time. The U.S. central bank’s policy makers are weighing when and how quickly to raise interest rates, which have been held near zero since 2008.
Kaplan is a professor of management practice and a senior associate dean at Harvard Business School. Before joining Harvard, he spent 22 years at Goldman Sachs and was vice chairman in charge of investment banking when he departed.
Kaplan also serves on the board of Heidrick & Struggles International, Inc., the Chicago-based firm hired by the Dallas Fed to lead the search for its president. He was initially contacted to fill the position by a member of the bank’s search committee, Dallas Fed spokesman James Hoard said in an e-mail.
“Kaplan subsequently became a candidate and participated in the same formal process as all of the other highly qualified and diverse candidates in the search,” Hoard said. Heidrick & Struggles declined to comment because its search work for clients is confidential.
Selection Process
Some critics say the process of selecting the policy makers who set U.S. interest rates is too secretive. The law governing the Fed allows the boards of the 12 regional banks -- who say they’re exempt from sunshine laws because they aren’t government officials -- to pick their presidents.
Among those who say the selection process for Fed presidents should be more open is Peter Conti-Brown, assistant professor of legal studies and business ethics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.
Even so, Conti-Brown praised the choice.