(Reuters) -The Chicago Federal Reserve Bank's board of directors has begun a search for a new bank president to succeed Charles Evans, who reaches the mandatory retirement age next January, and on Thursday announced he'd be leaving his post early next year.
The bank has hired recruiting firm Diversified Search Group to assist on the nationwide effort, it said in a statement.
Whoever gets the job will help set interest rates for the world's biggest economy as it faces the fastest inflation in 40 years -- made worse by the biggest military conflict in Europe since World War Two and a pandemic that has killed millions and continues to disrupt global supply chains as well as daily life in much of the world.
It is also a time of unprecedented change among the ranks of U.S. monetary policymakers themselves, a group of 19 when all vacancies are filled. The Fed has historically been dominated by white men. With as many as seven new policymakers coming on by early next year, that will change.
The U.S. Senate is expected to confirm two new members of the Fed's Board of Governors in coming weeks, both Black economists joining what is now an all-white leadership. University of Michigan provost Susan Collins will take the top job at the Boston Fed this summer, making her the first Black woman to lead a regional Fed bank.
The Dallas Fed, which like the Boston Fed lost its chief last fall amid a trading and ethics scandal, is in the middle of its own search for a new president. And Kansas City Fed chief Esther George will, like Evans, reach the regional banks' mandatory retirement age of 65 at the start of next year, and that bank will also need to seek a new leader.
Evans, who started at the Chicago Fed in 1991, is the longest-serving current Fed policymaker and has been an influential voice at the U.S. central bank since he took his current job in 2007.
He was a key architect of Fed communications in the wake of the financial crisis and the Great Recession as the bank sought to anchor market expectations for the path of interest rates, and helped develop the Fed's "dot plot" of policymaker rate forecasts.
Regional Fed bank presidents are picked by the non-bank directors of those banks, with input and approval by the Fed's Board of Directors.