Justin Fox, Columnist

The Federal Reserve Board Shouldn’t Be a Ph.D.-Only Zone

There are reasons not to give Stephen Moore a job at the Fed, but his academic background isn’t one of them.

April 1, 2019 at 6:00 PM UTC

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

Why not?
Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

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What qualifications are required to set U.S. monetary policy? For the seven spots on the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, the main hurdles are that you can’t simultaneously work at or hold stock in a Fed member bank, be a U.S. senator or member of the House of Representatives, already have served a full 14-year term, or hail from the same Federal Reserve district as another member. One of the governors also has to have “primary experience working in or supervising community banks having less than $10,000,000,000 in total assets.” Oh, and the president has to appoint you and the Senate confirm you.

For presidents of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (who get a seat along with the Fed governors on the interest-rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee) and the other 11 regional Federal Reserve Banks (who rotate in and out of four voting spots on the FOMC), the restrictions are similar, you need to be approved by the non-banker members of the regional bank’s board, and you should, according to the Fed, be able to: