Chief Executive of Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas to Speak at UCSB

Richard W. Fisher, president and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, will speak at UC Santa Barbara on Thursday, September 3.

His talk, which will focus on current economic issues and the economic outlook, will begin at 6 p.m. in the campus's Corwin Pavilion. A brief question-and-answer session will follow the presentation. A reception at 5 p.m. on the patio overlooking the lagoon outside Corwin Pavilion will precede the event, which is sponsored by UCSB's Laboratory for Aggregate Economics and Finance (LAEF).

As the chief executive of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Fisher serves as a member of the Federal Open Market Committee, the Federal Reserve's principal monetary policymaking group. After beginning his career at the private bank of Brown Brothers Harriman & Co in 1975, he became assistant to the secretary of the Treasury during the Carter administration. In that capacity, Fisher worked on issues related to the dollar crisis of 1978-79. After returning to Brown Brothers to found their Texas operations in Dallas, he created Fisher Capital Management and a separate funds-management firm, Fisher Ewing Partners, in 1987.

From 1997 to 2001, he served as a deputy U.S. trade representative with the rank of ambassador, overseeing the implementation of the North American Fair Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and various agreements with Vietnam, Korea, Japan, Chile, and Singapore. In addition, he was a senior member of the team that negotiated the bilateral accords for China's and Taiwan's accession to the World Trade Organization.

A first-generation American, Fisher is equally fluent in Spanish and English, having spent his formative years in Mexico. He attended the United States Naval Academy, graduated with honors from Harvard University, read Latin American politics at Oxford University, and earned his master's degree in business administration at Stanford University. In 2006, Fisher received the Service to Democracy Award and the Dwight D. Eisenhower Medal for Public Service. In April of this year, he was inducted into the Dallas Business Hall of Fame.

The Laboratory for Aggregate Economics and Finance at UCSB was established in 2005 to address important questions on growth and fluctuations in national –– or aggregate –– economies. Under the direction of Nobel Prize-winning economist Finn Kydland, the Jeffrey Henley Professor of Economics at UCSB, the laboratory identifies timely economic questions, issues, and/or anomalies that may be addressed in a conference workshop setting. The laboratory also serves as an environment in which resident and visiting scholars can conduct topical research in quantitative aggregate theory.

Issued: 8/20/09;

Updated: 9/2/09

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Laboratory for Aggregate Economics and Finance