The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas on Monday announced that its new president will be Robert Steven Kaplan, a Harvard Business School professor and former Goldman Sachs executive.
Here is what you need to know about Kaplan, who will be responsible for regulating banks in Texas and parts of Louisiana and New Mexico and will represent the bank at monetary policy meetings in Washington:
He’s a business self-help guru
Since stepping down as vice chairman of Goldman Sachs and joining Harvard in 2006, Kaplan has churned out books on business strategy and management.
In 2011, he published What to Ask the Person in the Mirror: Critical Questions for Becoming a More Effective Leader and Reaching Your Potential. Two years later, his book What You’re Really Meant to Do: A Road Map for Reaching Your Unique Potential came out. A third book, What You Really Need to Lead: The Power of Thinking and Acting Like an Owner, is set to reach stores a week after he begins at the Dallas Fed in early September.
His published books, which have received mostly favorable reviews, generally contain advice to leaders at businesses and other organizations.
He explains in a promotional video for one of his books that part of his responsibility at Goldman Sachs was coaching other executives at the bank, which is one of the world’s largest.
He translates that experience into suggestions for others, saying in another video, for instance, that “the outstanding businesses, nonprofits, are always trying to think, what are the macro trends, what’s going on out there, and how do we adapt.”
There’s little in his work to suggest how he’ll lead the Dallas Fed
Kaplan’s work and writings provide few clues about his philosophy as it pertains to monetary policy or regulating banks, the two main responsibilities of the Fed.
His research at Harvard mostly involves case studies of prominent business executives, including one two-part look at the career of Robert Rubin, the former Clinton treasury secretary and Goldman Sachs and Citigroup executive.
To the extent that Kaplan’s views on the economy have been spelled out in media interviews, he subscribes to a basic outlook similar to the one that President Obama has voiced on the campaign trail.
“The engine of a country is its middle class,” he said in a 2011 interview with MarketWatch. “You show me a growing middle class, and I’ll show you a growing country and a healthy financial sector.”
“Two tax cuts and two wars put us in a box,” he also said in that interview, adding that he favored tax increases on incomes above $250,000, which later Obama won.
He voted for Obama, but later criticized his leadership
Although Kaplan will be heading to a deeply red state, he voted for Obama for president, he disclosed in a Kansas City speech in 2012.
He voted for Obama, because he was a “visionary candidate” running on a vision of unity, he explained.
But by 2011 and 2012, that and other speeches reveal, Kaplan was no longer sure about that vision.
“If you ask me now what’s his vision as president, and I’ve been there to Washington to visit there and have written some things for them, I don’t know what their vision is,” he said in Kansas City, Mo. “I really don’t.”
Kaplan is succeeding Richard Fisher, who was also a Democrat. Although his criticisms of loose monetary policy and other federal policies often made him sound like a Texas conservative, Fisher ran for Senate in the state twice in the 1990s as a Democrat.
