Appointment of Richard W. Fisher as president, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas

Federal Reserve Bulletin, Wntr, 2005

Richard W. Fisher will become president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, effective April 4, 2005. The appointment of Mr. Fisher was announced on December 21, 2004, by Ray L. Hunt, chairman of the Bank's Board of Directors. Mr. Fisher will succeed Robert D. McTeer, Jr., who resigned November 4, 2004, to become chancellor of the Texas A&M University System.

Mr. Fisher, 55, is currently vice chairman of Kissinger McLarty Associates, a strategic advisory firm chaired by Henry Kissinger, the former Secretary of State of the United States of America.

As president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Mr. Fisher will head one of the twelve regional Reserve Banks, which with the Board of Governors in Washington, D.C., make up the Federal Reserve System, the nation's central bank. He will participate in meetings of the Federal Open Market Committee, a principal policymaking body in the Federal Reserve System, and during 2005, and every third year following, will be a voting member of the Committee.

The Dallas Reserve Bank serves the Eleventh Federal Reserve District, which includes all of Texas, as well as portions of Louisiana and New Mexico. The Federal Reserve is responsible for managing the country's money supply, supervising banks and depository institutions, and serving as fiscal agent for the federal government. The Federal Reserve also provides services to depository institutions.

Ray Hunt, chairman of the Board of Directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, said the following.

   "We are extremely pleased with the fact that Richard
   Fisher will soon be joining us as our new president.
   Richard possesses a superb knowledge of the nation's
   economic and monetary system and his direct personal
   involvement in a number of very important
   international economic treaties and activities make
   him uniquely qualified to provide the very forward-looking
   leadership for which the Federal Reserve
   Bank of Dallas has become known."

Mr. Fisher graduated with honors from Harvard University in economics, earned an MBA from Stanford University, and studied engineering at the U.S. Naval Academy and Latin American politics at Oxford University. He began his career as a banker at the private bank of Brown Brothers Harriman and Company. At Brown Brothers, Mr. Fisher was assistant to Robert Roosa, a former senior official of the Federal Reserve and Under Secretary of the Treasury, who had trained several leading financial officials, among them Paul Volcker, who became Federal Reserve Board Chairman before Mr. Greenspan.

In 1977 Mr. Fisher was "loaned out" by Brown Brothers to serve as Assistant to the Secretary of the Treasury during the Carter Administration, where he worked on issues related to the dollar crisis of 1978 and 1979, then returned to Brown Brothers to found their Texas operations in Dallas. In 1987 he created Fisher Capital Management, an investment advisory firm, and a separate funds management firm, Fisher Ewing Partners, which focused heavily on investing in distressed banks, savings and loans, and thrift institutions. He sold his controlling interests in both firms when he again joined the government in 1997.

From 1997 to 2001 Mr. Fisher served as Deputy United States Trade Representative with the rank of Ambassador. Ambassador Fisher oversaw the implementation of NAFTA, negotiations for the Free Trade Area of the Americas, and the initiation of the U.S.-Chile Free Trade Agreement negotiations. He negotiated several major agreements on behalf of the United States in Asia, including the Bilateral Trade Agreement with Vietnam signed by President Bush, the U.S.-Korea Auto Agreement of 1998, and the initiation of the Free Trade Agreement with Singapore, and was a senior member of the team that negotiated the bilateral accords for China and Taiwan's accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO). Under an agreement struck between President Clinton and Japanese Prime Minister Hashimoto, Ambassador Fisher co-chaired the U.S.-Japan Enhanced Initiative on Competition and Deregulation, which led to significant changes in the financial, telecommunications, commercial, and legal sectors of the Japanese economy.

Mr. Fisher stated the following:

    "I am excited at the prospect of working for the
    brilliant staff at the Dallas Fed. This is a homecoming
    in more than one way. I started my career at Brown
    Brothers as the assistant to Robert Roosa, a legendary
    figure in both the Federal Reserve System and the
    U.S. Treasury. He and the partners there taught me the
    bond, stock, and foreign exchange markets and the
    investment trade. It was Mr. Roosa's ardent wish that
    someday I would 'pay it back' by joining the Federal
    Reserve, which he considered the 'purest form of
    public service, above and beyond the reach of partisan
    politics.' He is probably grinning up in heaven
    right now."

A biographical summary is available on the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas's web site, www.dallasfed.org/news/releases/2004/nr041221.htm.