The Most Consequential Federal Reserve Chairs
Marriner Eccles (1890-1977)
A Utah banker and industrialist who came to Washington with an unusual message for a banker in 1933: that the Depression was a problem of insufficient aggregate demand, and that government spending was needed to restore it. Appointed to lead the Federal Reserve Board in 1934, he drove the Banking Act of 1935 through Congress, which created the Board of Governors as it exists today, stripped the Treasury Secretary of his seat, and gave the Washington governors a permanent majority on the Federal Open Market Committee. Eccles served until 1948 and clashed openly with the Treasury near the end of his tenure over the wartime bond-yield peg, a fight his successors resolved with the 1951 Accord. The Board's headquarters bears his name.
William McChesney Martin (1906-1998)
Chair from 1951 to 1970, the longest-serving in the institution's history, and the man who established what central bank independence means in practice. Martin arrived immediately after the Treasury-Fed Accord he had helped negotiate, and spent nineteen years insisting that the Fed act pre-emptively rather than waiting for inflation to appear in published data. His punch bowl metaphor from a 1955 speech remains the most quoted line in American central banking. Martin also served under five presidents of both parties and repeatedly resisted White House pressure for easier policy, most notably during the fiscal expansion of the late 1960s, when he argued that financing the Vietnam War and the Great Society simultaneously required tighter money.
Arthur Burns (1904-1987)
A distinguished empirical economist — his work with Wesley Mitchell on measuring business cycles remains foundational — who chaired the Fed from 1970 to 1978 and presided over the worst inflation in modern American history. Burns understood the analytics well but operated on a view that inflation was largely driven by unions, oil producers, and fiscal policy rather than by money, and the FOMC under his leadership eased whenever unemployment rose. The result was a ratchet: each cycle ended with higher inflation than the last. His tenure is now the standard illustration of why central banks value rules, transparency, and credibility over unconstrained discretion, and it directly motivated the inflation-targeting movement of the following decades.
Paul Volcker (1927-2019)
Chair from 1979 to 1987 and, by common consent, the most consequential central banker of the postwar era. Volcker inherited double-digit inflation and an institution whose promises the public had stopped believing. His response — shifting the operating target to bank reserves in October 1979 and tolerating extraordinarily high and volatile short-term rates — produced two recessions and unemployment above ten percent, but it re-anchored expectations and ended the Great Inflation. Volcker was widely criticized at the time by builders, farmers, and members of Congress. He later served as chair of an economic advisory board after the 2008 crisis and gave his name to the Volcker Rule limiting proprietary trading at banks.
Greenspan, Bernanke, Yellen, and Powell
Alan Greenspan (1987-2006) inherited Volcker's hard-won credibility and used it to run policy on fine judgment rather than fixed rules, presiding over the Great Moderation. Ben Bernanke (2006-2014) brought academic expertise on the Depression and on deflation to the 2008 crisis, and delivered the explicit two percent inflation target in January 2012. Janet Yellen (2014-2018), a labor economist and the first woman to hold the job, began normalizing policy and later became Treasury Secretary — the only person to have led the Fed, the Treasury, and the Council of Economic Advisers. Jerome Powell, chair from February 2018, oversaw the pandemic emergency response and the 2022 tightening cycle.