Who is Atlanta Fed President Raphael Bostic?
Bostic took office at the Atlanta Fed in June 2017
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Raphael Bostic is one of the key Federal Reserve policymakers providing insight into what the pace and shape of the U.S. economic recovery from the coronavirus pandemic will look like.
"In many communities, the ‘V’ recovery is going to be very difficult to achieve,” Bostic said in a webinar at the beginning of May. “But across the country, there has been a fair amount of diversity of experiences, diversity of vulnerability, and that will translate into diversity of recoveries.”
Bostic is the president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta and is a participant on the central bank's rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee, although he is not a voting member this year.
He took office at the Atlanta Fed in June 2017.
Bostic is the first African-American to lead any of the Fed's 12 regional reserve banks.
“This could have happened a long time ago, but we’re happy that it happened now, and I look forward to this being a steppingstone for many others to have this opportunity as well,” Bostic said in a statement released by the Atlanta Fed in 2017.
Before that, Bostic, now 54, was a director of the Bedrosian Center on Governance at the University of California's Sol Price School of Public Policy.
He began working at USC in 2001 as a professor in the university's School of Policy, Planning and Development. He's studied a slew of fields, including homeownership, housing finance, neighborhood change and the role of institutions in shaping policy effectiveness.
Between 2009 and 2012, Bostic was the assistant secretary for policy development and research at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. He helped craft the Obama administration’s response to the housing bubble collapse before returning to USC in 2012.
In 1995, Bostic joined the Fed's board of governors as an economist.
Bostic was born in New York City in 1966 and grew up in Delran, New Jersey.
He graduated from Harvard University in 1987 with a combined major in economics and psychology and earned his doctorate in economics from Stanford University in 1995.