PrintFederal Reserve Bank Presidents
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John C. Williams
President
Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco
Dr. Williams took office March 1, 2011, as the twelfth president and chief executive officer of the Twelfth District Federal Reserve Bank, at San Francisco. In 2012, he serves as a voting member of the Federal Open Market Committee.
Dr. Williams, a native of Sacramento, California, served since 2009 as executive vice president and director of research for the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, which he joined in 2002 as a research advisor. Subsequently, he was named senior vice president and advisor in 2004.
He began his career as an economist in 1994, when he joined the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, following the completion of his Ph.D. in Economics at Stanford University. He became senior economist at the Board in 1998 and served on loan from 1999 to 2000 as senior economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers. He subsequently returned to the Board, where he remained until he joined the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.
Dr. Williams' research focuses on topics including: monetary policy under uncertainty and with imperfect information; learning; research and development; innovation; productivity, and business cycles. He has collaborated with economists from throughout the country and across the globe to examine economic and policy issues from different perspectives, and has published numerous articles in leading research journals.
Dr. Williams currently serves as the managing editor of the International Journal of Central Banking. Previously, he served as associate editor of the American Economic Review and the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control. He has been a research associate for the Centre for Applied Macroeconomic Analysis since 2008. Additionally, he has been a lecturer at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business.
Prior to completing his doctorate at Stanford, he earned a Master's of Science with distinction in economics from the London School of Economics in 1989, and an A.B. with high distinction from the University of California at Berkeley in 1984.
He is married and has two teenage sons.
San Francisco -- Twelfth District
- Head office at San Francisco, California.
Branch Banks at Los Angeles, California; Portland, Oregon; Salt Lake City, Utah; and Seattle, Washington.
Covers the states of Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, and Washington, and serves American Samoa, Guam, and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands.
