A Timeline of Federal Reserve Chairs
1914-1933: The Founding Generation
The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 created a Federal Reserve Board in Washington with a chairman, but the Board was weaker than its modern successor: the Secretary of the Treasury and the Comptroller of the Currency sat on it as ex officio members, and real operational power lay with the twelve regional Reserve Banks. Charles S. Hamlin became the first chairman in 1914. His successors through the 1920s presided over an institution still learning what a central bank does, and the Board's authority was often overshadowed by Benjamin Strong, the dominant governor of the New York Reserve Bank until his death in 1928. The Board's failure to prevent the banking collapses of 1930-1933 discredited the original decentralized design.
1934-1948: Marriner Eccles Rebuilds the Institution
Marriner Eccles, a Utah banker who had watched his own institutions survive the Depression, was appointed in 1934 and became the architect of the modern Federal Reserve. He pushed for the Banking Act of 1935, which renamed the Federal Reserve Board the Board of Governors, removed the Treasury Secretary and the Comptroller from it, gave governors long fourteen-year terms, and restructured the Federal Open Market Committee so that the seven Washington governors held a majority over the Reserve Bank presidents. Eccles served through the Second World War, during which the Fed pegged Treasury yields to hold down the government's wartime borrowing costs. The Board's headquarters in Washington is named the Eccles Building in his honor.
1951-1970: William McChesney Martin
Thomas McCabe chaired the Board during the difficult negotiations that produced the March 1951 Treasury-Fed Accord, which ended the yield peg and restored the Fed's operational independence. William McChesney Martin, who had worked on the Accord from the Treasury side, then took over and served until 1970 under five presidents — the longest tenure of any chair. Martin defined the doctrine that the Fed should act before inflation becomes visible, memorably describing the central bank as the chaperone who takes away the punch bowl just as the party gets going. He also resisted political pressure publicly, most famously in disputes with President Lyndon Johnson over tightening during the Vietnam War buildup.
1970-1987: Burns, Miller, and Volcker
Arthur Burns chaired the Fed from 1970 to 1978, the years when inflation became entrenched in the American economy and the credibility of discretionary monetary policy collapsed. G. William Miller served only from March 1978 to August 1979 before moving to the Treasury, the shortest tenure of the modern era. Paul Volcker then took the chair in August 1979 and, within two months, announced the change in operating procedure that allowed short-term interest rates to rise to unprecedented levels. Two recessions and roughly three years later, inflation had fallen by around ten percentage points. Volcker served until August 1987 and remains the reference point for what monetary policy independence looks like under maximum political strain.
1987-Present: Greenspan, Bernanke, Yellen, Powell
Alan Greenspan served from August 1987 to January 2006, the second-longest tenure, spanning the 1987 crash, the 1990s productivity boom, and the dot-com cycle. Ben Bernanke (2006-2014), a Depression scholar, led the response to the 2008 financial crisis, took the policy rate to the effective lower bound, launched large-scale asset purchases, and in January 2012 announced the Fed's first explicit numerical inflation target. Janet Yellen (2014-2018) was the first woman to chair the Federal Reserve and began the exit from crisis-era settings, raising rates in December 2015. Jerome Powell took office in February 2018 and led the emergency response to the 2020 pandemic and the tightening cycle that began in 2022.