William Poole

Mr. Poole is Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, Senior Economic Adviser to Merk Investments and a Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the University of Delaware.
He retired as President and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis in March 2008.
In that position, which he held from March 1998, he served on the Federal Reserve’s main monetary policy body, the Federal Open Market Committee.
He directed the Bank’s main office in St. Louis and its three branches in Memphis, Little Rock and Louisville.
At Merk, he contributes to the economic and monetary policy research and analysis providing valuable insights to the portfolio management team.
In addition, he continues to be an active and sought after speaker and author.
Before joining the St. Louis Fed, Mr. Poole was Herbert H.
Goldberger Professor of Economics at Brown University.
He served on the Brown faculty from 1974 to 1998 and the faculty of The Johns Hopkins University from 1963 to 1969.
Between these two university positions, he was senior economist at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System in Washington.
He was a member of the Council of Economic Advisers in the first Reagan administration, from 1982 to 1985.
Mr. Poole received his AB degree from Swarthmore College in 1959, and MBA and Ph.D.
degrees from the University of Chicago in 1963 and 1966, respectively.
Swarthmore honored him with the Doctor of Laws degree in 1989.
He was inducted into The Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars in 2005 and presented with the Adam Smith Award by the National Association for Business Economics in 2006.
In 2007, the Global Interdependence Center presented him its Frederick Heldring Award.