Michael H. Moskow

Michael H. Moskow was the eighth president and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, serving from September 1, 1994, to August 31, 2007.

Moskow received a bachelor’s degree in economics from Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, in 1959 and a doctorate in business and applied economics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1965.

Moscow’s pre-Fed career spanned academia, the private sector, and government. At the beginning of his career, he taught economics, labor relations, and management at Temple University, Lafayette College, and Drexel University. Later, he joined the faculty at Northwestern University in 1993.¹ He served as US trade representative beginning in 1991, and held a number of other government positions earlier in his career in the late 1960s and 1970s: undersecretary of labor at the Department of Labor; director of the Council on Wage and Price Stability; assistant secretary for policy development and research at the Department of Housing and Urban Development; and and senior staff economist with the Council of Economic Advisers. In the private sector, Moskow joined the private sector at Esmark, Inc. in Chicago in 1977, and later held senior management positions at Northwest Industries; Dart and Kraft, Inc.; and Premark International.¹

He took office as Chicago Fed president in 1994.² His views on monetary policy led him to often be considered an "inflationary hawk."³ He also worked to improve transparency of the Federal Reserve System.⁴ During his tenure, the Chicago Fed also completed preparation of its internal systems to help protect the US financial system from the “Y2K” threat⁵ to automated processes in 1999.⁶

Moskow retired from the Federal Reserve System in 2007.⁷ 

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Written by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago as of November 2013 and updated by Ella Needler and Genevieve Podleski as of December 2022. See disclaimer and update policy.