The next president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia will be Patrick Harker, who will leave his job as president of the University of Delaware to take the post, the regional bank announced Tuesday.
As the head of the Philly Fed, Harker will be responsible for overseeing banks in the region, which encompasses the eastern part of Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey and Delaware. He also will participate in the Fed’s deliberations on monetary policy, although he will not be among the regional bank presidents with a vote on the monetary policy committee until 2017.
Harker succeeds Charles Plosser, who departed the Philly Fed on Sunday. Plosser was an academic who generally favored tighter monetary policy than Federal Reserve chairwoman Janet Yellen and the rest of the Fed.
Harker has served as a Class B director of the Philly Fed for three years, but will be one of the few regional bank presidents who is not a PhD economist. His recent background is in university administration, leading the University of Delaware since 2007 and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School for business before that. Harker does have a master’s degree in economics and a doctorate in engineering from the University of Pennsylvania. He has taught operations research, a field closely related to economics.
Harker serves on the board of directors of Pepco Holdings and the Huntsman Corp., and on the board of advisors for Decisions Lens.
The decision to appoint Harker was made by the regional bank’s board of directors and approved by the Fed Board of Governors in Washington.
The central bank this month is losing its two most prominent monetary policy “hawks,” that is, members who, on balance, favor higher interest rates and worry more about the possibility of rising inflation.
In addition to Plosser, Dallas Fed president Richard Fisher is set to retire later in March. Fisher and Plosser are among the few members of the Fed who have voted against the easy-money policies commissioned by Yellen and former Fed chair Ben Bernanke over the course of the recession.
