Richard W. Fisher

Richard W. Fisher served as the twelfth president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas from April 4, 2005, to March 19, 2015.Fisher was born in Los Angeles, California. He spent his childhood years in Southern California, Mexico City, and Miami, Florida.

Fisher attended the US Naval Academy from 1967 to 1969, graduated with honors from Harvard University with a degree in economics in 1971, studied Latin American politics at Oxford from 1972 to 1973, and received a master’s degree in business administration from Stanford University in 1975.

Fisher began his career in 1975 at the private bank of Brown Brothers Harriman & Co., where he specialized in fixed income and foreign exchange markets. He became assistant to the secretary of the Treasury during the Carter administration, working on issues related to the dollar crisis of 1978–79. He then returned to Brown Brothers to found their Texas operations in Dallas.

In 1987, Fisher created Fisher Capital Management and a separate funds-management firm, Fisher Ewing Partners. He sold his controlling interests in both firms when he rejoined the government in 1997.

From 1997 to 2001, Fisher was deputy US trade representative with the rank of ambassador. He oversaw the implementation of NAFTA and various agreements with Vietnam, Korea, Japan, Chile, and Singapore. He was a senior member of the team that negotiated the bilateral accords for China's and Taiwan's accession to the World Trade Organization.

Fisher is former vice chairman of Kissinger McLarty Associates, a strategic advisory firm chaired by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

During his time at the Dallas Fed, Fisher has focused the Reserve Bank’s work on prominent economic policy issues.  The Reserve Bank’s Globalization and Monetary Policy Institute was established in 2007 with the purpose of better understanding how the process of deepening economic integration between the countries of the world, or globalization, alters the environment in which US monetary policy decisions are made.

Fisher has also positioned the Reserve Bank at the forefront of the debate on “Too Big to Fail” financial institutions, advocating for an environment that allows the largest banks to fail and returns market discipline to the banking system.

Throughout his career, Fisher has served on numerous for-profit and not-for-profit boards. He also has maintained his academic interests, teaching graduate courses and serving on several university boards. Fisher serves on Harvard University's Board of Overseers, one of the university's two governing boards. He was a Weatherhead Fellow at Harvard in 2001, is an honorary fellow of Hertford College at Oxford University, and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

A first-generation American, Fisher is equally fluent in Spanish and English. In October 2006, he received the Service to Democracy Award and Dwight D. Eisenhower Medal for Public Service from the American Assembly. In April 2009, he was inducted into the Dallas Business Hall of Fame.

Written by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. See disclaimer.