Eric S. Rosengren

Rosengren was born in Ridgewood, New Jersey, the grandson of a Swedish immigrant.[2] He graduated summa cum laude from Colby College with a B.A. and highest honors in economics.[3] He then spent one year in Australia as a Thomas Watson Fellow. Following his year in Australia, he went to the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he earned an M.S. in economics in 1984 and a Ph.D. in economics in 1986.[3]

Rosengren has held senior positions within the Federal Reserve in both the research and bank supervision functions. He joined the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston in 1985 as an economist in the Research Department. He was promoted to Assistant Vice President in 1989 and to Vice President in 1991 as head of the Banking and Monetary Policy section of the Research Department.[3] In 2000, he was named Senior Vice President and head of the Supervision and Regulation Department. He assumed the additional title of Chief Discount Officer in 2003, and in 2005, he was named Executive Vice President. While in the bank supervision function, he obtained significant domestic and international regulatory experience related to the Basel II Capital Accord.[4]

In his work as an economist, Rosengren has made the link between financial problems and the real economy a focus of his research, and he has published extensively on macroeconomics, international banking, bank supervision, and risk management. He has been an author on over 100 articles and papers on economics and finance, including articles in many of the top economics and finance journals.

He has led a number of efforts to expand the Boston Fed's outreach and impact on low- and moderate-income communities – among them hosting sizable foreclosure-prevention workshops for New England residents during the Great Recession,[5] and running a competition for postindustrial New England communities to develop cross-sector collaboration and ultimately help improve the lives of lower-income residents.[6]

In early September 2021, a financial disclosure form showed that Rosengren had conducted trades in the tens of thousands of dollars in individual stocks, including Pfizer, Chevron and AT&T.

In 2020, Rosengren directly traded sizeable amounts of four REITs, including Annaly Capital Management Inc., a REIT that holds mortgage-backed securities.[7] During the time that he made these trades, the Fed had begun buying $40 billion of this type of debt per month, a fact that Rosengren, as a Federal Open Market Committee participant in 2020, would have had non-publicly available knowledge of; he had also advocated specific Fed policies that would have a bearing on the value of these assets.[7][8] Rosengren was criticized for these activities, which involved trades of tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars, and which critics claimed undermined confidence in the activities of the Federal Reserve.[9][10][11][12][8] After the revelations concerning these trades by Rosengren and millions of dollars worth of trades by Robert Kaplan, his colleague at the Federal Reserve, Sen. Elizabeth Warren called on all Federal Reserve presidents to be banned from trading and owning individual stocks. In response, Rosengren said he would sell his individual stocks.[13]

On September 27, 2021, Rosengren announced his retirement beginning on September 30, citing a deteriorating kidney condition. The announcement comes after the Federal Reserve began a review of how it oversees the investments of officers. Rosengren was due to retire in June 2022 when he reached the mandatory retirement age of 65.[14]

• Boston Fed biography
• Federal Reserve Bank biography
• Biography at the Federal Reserve System Web site.
• "Eric S. Rosengren". EconPapers.