(Reuters) – After more than a year of search, the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank has a new leader: Jeffrey Schmid, a former banking executive who ran three different financial institutions over a four-decade-plus career that also included a stint as a bank examiner.
Schmid, who for the last two years has led the Southwestern Graduate School of Banking Foundation, will fill one of 19 seats at the nation’s monetary-policy-setting table setting interest rates for the world’s biggest economy.
He starts Aug. 21, the Kansas City Fed said on Wednesday, and is expected to attend the Fed’s next rate-setting meeting, in September.
He will be the fourth new Fed president in just over a year. A search for a new president at a fifth regional Fed bank, in St. Louis, began last month when its longtime leader, James Bullard, left for a job as dean of a business school.
Schmid is the first Kansas City Fed leader to be picked from outside of its own ranks in at least 60 years. Its most recent president was Esther George, a career Fed staffer and former bank supervisor who had the top job for more than a decade and departed in January after hitting the mandatory retirement age of 65.
The bank’s presidents have also typically been hawkish voices on monetary policy.
Schmid began his career as a bank examiner for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, before becoming the president of the American National Bank in Omaha and then running the Mutual of Omaha Bank for 12 years as its CEO.
He was CEO of Susser Bank in Dallas for two years before taking his current job where he oversees bank management training programs.
(Reporting by Ann Saphir; Editing by Andrea Ricci)
