Narayana Kocherlakota, Columnist

The Fed Needs to Challenge Itself

Choosing someone safe to head the New York Fed would be a mistake.

March 29, 2018 at 10:00 AM UTC

Narayana Kocherlakota is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is a professor of economics at the University of Rochester and was president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis from 2009 to 2015.

Will the new boss be like the old boss?
Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

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Officials at the U.S. Federal Reserve are looking to fill one of the most important positions at the world’s most powerful central bank: the president of the New York Fed. They should recognize that the safest choice isn’t likely to be the best.

This is an enormously complex job. It entails leading supervision of the country’s largest banks, overseeing an interbank payment system crucial to the country’s economic health, serving as vice-chair of the policy-making Federal Open Market Committee, and running the market operations that put monetary-policy decisions into action. On top of all that, the New York Fed president must manage nearly 3,000 employees and be a skilled communicator with the public and, increasingly, with Congress.