Atlanta Fed President Raphael Bostic retires, search continues for successor
In early February, Raphael Bostic sat on a stage chuckling, and a bit embarrassed, while his predecessor handed him a pair of gifts.
One was a giant pair of scissors and the other a rubber mask of Donald Trump, symbols of some of the challenges Bostic has faced while leading the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.
“Just in case your successor wants to cut something, like interest rates,” Dennis Lockhart, the former president of the Atlanta Fed, joked with Bostic, the outgoing president of the Atlanta Fed.
Bostic, 59, has served in the role for nearly nine years after working as a Fed economist, academic and an assistant secretary at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. But his tenure leading the Atlanta Fed has now come to a close. He is retiring as of Saturday.
Since taking the top job in June 2017, Bostic had to steer the institution through unprecedented, challenging economic times. As he put it in a recent farewell video, he was “paid to worry about everything in this job, and there’s been no shortage of stuff to worry about.”
A slow-growing economy. A pandemic. Huge and sudden job losses. Inflation. Wars. Attacks on the Fed’s independence.
The Atlanta Fed, located in Midtown, is one of 12 regional banks in the Federal Reserve System. Its territory includes Alabama, Florida and Georgia, and portions of Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee.
The Fed has two mandates from Congress: promoting maximum employment and promoting price stability.
All Reserve Bank presidents typically serve five-year terms that expire in years ending in 1 or 6. They are subject to a mandatory retirement age of 65, but Bostic is leaving years before reaching that age.
Bostic said he is leaving now not because of the challenges the Atlanta Fed has faced, but because he thinks the organization has reached the goals he had set for it: to become an institution that is more agile, risk tolerant and incorporates more voices.
“It was not an easy call,” Bostic wrote in an op-ed for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “I started pondering my long-term plans more than two years ago.”
“In recent months, I began to sense that my fundamental goals for the institution were being internalized and that if I stayed much longer, I risked settling into the role of caretaker. That is not what the bank needs to continue serving the people of the Sixth District,” Bostic continued.
Even before starting his work at the Fed, Bostic was already pushing the institution into new territory as the first Black and openly gay chief executive of a regional Fed bank.
During his tenure, he directed attention to economic immobility and inequality and pushed business, civic and government leaders to acknowledge diversity not simply as a moral issue but as an economic imperative.
“Raphael proves that each generation is an improvement on the former,” Lockhart, his predecessor, said in early February.
The Atlanta Fed under Bostic introduced new economic tools, like a GDP forecasting tool and the Home Ownership Affordability Monitor, to provide a more accessible, updated look at key aspects of the U.S. economy.
“One of the most profound parts of Raphael’s legacy here in Atlanta was the way in which he was attuned to the challenges that the everyday person had,” Adrian Cronje, CEO of wealth management firm Balentine, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
“His mantra of building an economy that works for everybody was way out ahead of the last two years where it feels like all of a sudden everybody has woken up to the affordability crisis that is plaguing so many members in our economy,” Cronje said.
But Bostic wasn’t just the head of the Atlanta Fed. He became a respected, active member of the Atlanta community. He served as chairman of the boards of the Metro Atlanta Chamber and the United Way of Greater Atlanta, and was also a member of the Rotary Club of Atlanta.
Cronje recalled one Monday morning last year when Rotary members were packing food baskets and Bostic showed up to help.
“Guess who was there? Raphael Bostic with his shirt sleeves rolled up. I mean, he’s the Atlanta Fed chair. He had just given an interview on national television, but there he was, walking the talk,” Cronje said.
Bostic’s tenure was also touched by controversy over his investment trades.
Between 2018 and 2023, 154 financial trades were executed on behalf of Bostic that violated Fed rules, according to the findings of an investigation by the Office of the Inspector General. Investigators did not find any evidence, however, that the trades were based on confidential Fed committee information and said Bostic did not have financial conflicts of interest.
The investigation started after Bostic disclosed in 2022 the trading that violated the Fed’s rules, saying they were conducted by a third-party money manager.
Bostic’s departure comes as President Donald Trump has worked to exert more control over the independent central bank, which he has pushed to lower interest rates more aggressively. Last summer, Trump fired Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, the first time a president has tried to oust a sitting governor. Cook, a Georgia-born economist and Spelman College alumna, sued and the U.S. Supreme Court has allowed her to stay in her role while her lawsuit is pending.
On top of that, in January, the Department of Justice launched a criminal investigation into Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, another unprecedented move. Trump has nominated conservative economist Kevin Warsh to replace Powell when his term is up in May.
But neither Trump nor the U.S. Senate will choose Bostic’s replacement. The presidents of the Fed’s regional banks are chosen by their local boards but are subject to the approval of the Fed’s Board of Governors.
The Atlanta Fed’s board of directors is conducting a search for a new president and CEO. Heidrick & Struggles, an executive search firm, is assisting in the process.
There is no timeline for when a new Atlanta Fed chief will be named. The bank’s first vice president and chief operating officer, Cheryl Venable, will become the interim president until a permanent replacement is found.
The Atlanta Fed will host a public forum March 11 to provide updates on the search.
As for what Bostic will do after he leaves, that is still up in the air. He floated some ideas earlier this month speaking to Khara Persad on the Atlanta Fed’s “Economy Matters” podcast.
The first was helping people have important documents in order, like titles, wills, powers of attorney and more. Bostic has also been looking at Atlanta’s Civil Rights history and how much of the movement was led by faith leaders and centered around economic justice and mobility.
“As I’ve talked to the pastors and rabbis around here, they’ve expressed an openness and an interest in being more visible in those things. And so, I’d like to explore if there are ways to to help facilitate that, because our problems and challenges are large,” Bostic said.
But as for what he will do on the first day of his retirement? Sleep in.
“The idea is really just to exhale, to relax, to recover and to try to just clear my head of all the things that I’ve just had to be juggling, and then see what comes in,” Bostic told Persad.
“I’m not going to just go to a rocking chair and look out at the street go by. But I have been running really hard, and so I want to think about like, how hard do I want to run? How much moment-to-moment accountability and responsibility do I want to have? I actually don’t know what the answers to those things are going to be. It’s actually a bit scary to feel like I’m going to be stepping out into a void for an experience that I’ve never had.”
About the Author
Mirtha Donastorg is a reporter on The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s business team focusing on Black wealth, entrepreneurship, and minority-owned businesses as well as innovation at Atlanta’s HBCUs.
