Stacey Tevlin is the most important person in U.S. economics that you have probably never heard of. She leads a team of 357 people in the Federal Reserve’s Research and Statistics division, which is entrusted with the forecasts for policy makers as they weigh interest rates every six weeks.
Her work appears in a document called the Teal Book, which is kept confidential for five years. She doesn’t go on television, give speeches, or even talk to reporters very often. Yet her team’s work has so much influence on the policy debate that one former Fed governor calls the staff forecast “the 13th member” of the Federal Open Market Committee.
