Age around 60? Check. Steel-grey hair? Check. Wire-rim-type eyeglasses? Check. Background working for a Wall Street investment bank? Check. At first blush Robert Steven Kaplan, just selected as the new president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, seems pretty much like the old president and CEO he’s replacing, Richard Fisher.
While Fisher was known as an “inflation hawk,” though, not that much seems to be known about Kaplan’s views on monetary policy. He’s currently a business professor at Harvard, and previously was vice chairman of the Goldman Sachs Group. (Oh yeah: he’s also on the board of Heidrick & Struggles International, the search firm that was hired to replace Fisher. It’s said he’ll quit the board.)
Assesses Danielle DiMartino Booth, an ex-Fed employee who worked for Fisher as an advisor: “At least on paper, [Kaplan’s] qualifications suggest that he is highly capable of maintaining the Dallas Fed’s reputation as a district that can continue to be global in perspective and incorporate the financial markets into its economic and monetary policy-making framework.”
