Eric Rosengren, the president and chief executive of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, announced on Monday that he would retire nearly a year earlier than planned.
Rosengren said that he was retiring in hopes that a lifestyle change would prevent a kidney condition from worsening.
Rosengren was one of two Fed presidents whose financial activity in 2020 has come under fire in recent weeks. Rosengren held stakes in and traded shares of real estate investment trust at a time when the Fed was intervening in markets, including the market for mortgage securities, to stave off the effects of the pandemic. In addition, Rosengren disclosed he had traded individual stocks, including shares of Pfizer and AT&T.
Dallas Fed President Robert Kaplan also disclosed that he had traded millions of dollars of stocks.
Rosengren, 64, has been president of the Boston Fed since 2007. He had previously planned to retire in June 2022.
The Boston Fed was central to the central bank’s economic rescue efforts last year. It ran both the money market mutual fund program and the Main Street lending backstop program.
Rosengren came to the Boston Fed in 1985 as a research economist. In 2000, he was named head of the Boston Fed’s bank supervision operations. His economic work has included papers on how problems in the financial sector can spill over into the broader economy. He held a Master of Science and Ph.D. in economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“Eric has distinguished himself time and again during more than three decades of dedicated public service in the Federal Reserve System. He led the Fed’s work in managing several emergency lending facilities in two separate periods of economic crisis. In addition to his monetary policy insights, Eric brought a relentless focus on how best to ensure the stability of the financial system. My colleagues and I will miss him,” Fed chair Jerome Powell said in a statement.
Rosengren pushed for the idea that regional Fed banks should be “visible leaders in the communities we serve.” In this regard he expanded the Boston Fed’s outreach to and impact on low- and moderate-income communities. The Bank hosted foreclosure-prevention workshops for New Englanders during the Great Recession.
Content created by John Carney
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