<p>The Senate confirmed Jeremy Stein '83 and Jerome Powell '75 to the Federal Reserve Board. Stein, who studied economics and co-captained the gymnastics team as an undergraduate, received his Ph.D. in economics from MIT in 1986. Since then, he has taught finance at Harvard and MIT. He took leave from Harvard in 2009 to advise Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and serve on the National Economic Council. He also served one year as president of the American Finance Association, in 2008. Powell, a politics major at Princeton, received his law degree from Georgetown in 1979 and worked as a lawyer and investment banker before becoming undersecretary of the treasury for finance. He also was a partner at The Carlyle Group, a private equity and asset management firm, from 1997 to 2005. More recently, he has served as a visiting scholar at the D.C.-based Bipartisan Policy Center.</p>
<p>Two current members of the Federal Reserve Board also have Princeton ties: Chairman Ben Bernanke was the Class of 1926 Professor of Economics and Public Affairs and a chairman of the economics department, while board member Daniel K. Tarullo was a visiting professor at the University in 2004. During 2005 Tarullo was the chair the Economic Security group of the Princeton Project on National Security. The Princeton Project on National Security was a multi-year, bipartisan initiative to develop a sustainable and effective national security strategy for the United States of America. </p>
<p>Narayana Kocherlakota '83 became the 12th president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis on Oct. 8, 2009. As president, Kocherlakota serves on the Federal Open Market Committee, the policy making arm of the Federal Reserve System, He earned a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago in 1987 and an A.B. in mathematics from Princeton in 1983.</p>
<p>The recent $2+ billion trading loss by JPMorganChase has renewed attention to the Volker Rule. Paul Volker '49 earned a bachelor of arts degree, summa cum laude, from Princeton in 1949. He was appointed Federal Reserve chairman in 1979 by President Jimmy Carter and reappointed in 1983 by President Ronald Reagan. He led the fight to rejuvenate the U.S. economy after the high inflation of the 1970s; inflation fell from 13.6 percent in 1980 to 3.2 percent by 1983. The Volcker Rule is a specific section of the DoddFrank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act to restrict United States banks from making certain kinds of speculative investments that do not benefit their customers. While the regulations implementing the Volker Rule have not been finalized the intent of the Volker rule would be to prohibit the type of speculative trading that caused JPMorganChase’s loss. Volker was a professor for ten years in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton.</p>