Raphael Bostic, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, has acknowledged that investment trades were made on his behalf last year during a period prohibited by Fed rules.
In a disclosure released last week, Bostic said that he had inadvertently violated the ban when a money manager traded funds for him on May 2, 2022 — just before a scheduled meeting of the Fed’s Open Market Committee, which sets the economy’s benchmark interest rate.
The trades disclosed Thursday have been reported to the Atlanta Fed and Fed ethics officers and is being investigated by the Fed’s inspector general.
The FOMC’s decisions directly affect the nation’s largest banks and ripple through to millions of other loans, so the actions are closely watched by investors.
According to the financial disclosure forms, the money manager bought and sold 19 exchange-traded funds — nine sales and 10 purchases — their value between $1,000 and $50,000.
Bostic had a similar issue with some trades carried out in the spring of 2020. In his disclosure, he said those were also unintentional mistakes, carried out by advisers handling his investments.
Bostic, one of a dozen regional bank presidents, was appointed in June 2017. He was the first Black and first openly gay president of a Fed branch. While he was not a voting member of the FOMC, the central bank’s rules forbid trading or public speaking by senior officials in the two weeks before each meeting.
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