By Howard Schneider
WASHINGTON, Dec 15 (Reuters) - The Atlanta Federal Reserve said on Monday it had begun the process for choosing a replacement for outgoing President Raphael Bostic, with plans to hire an executive search firm to assemble "a large pool of candidates who have meaningful ties to the Sixth Federal Reserve District."
“We will undertake a broad search to find an experienced and strong leader," Atlanta Fed Board Chair Gregory Haile said in a press release announcing the bank's plans for
replacing Bostic, who is retiring when his current term concludes at the end of February.
The reference to "meaningful ties" to the Atlanta-based region comes after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent noted that some recently hired regional bank heads had recently moved to their districts from New York, and suggested that a residency requirement of as much three years before hiring might be more in the spirit of regional representation.
Connections to the district were not mentioned when the Atlanta Fed opened the process that led to Bostic's hiring in 2017, with then-Board Chair Thomas Fanning saying in a video about the search that the bank was looking for "diverse candidates of exemplary personal character and intellect," and had put up a web portal to take suggestions "from everyone in our district and around the country."
Bostic, the first Black and openly gay president of one of the Fed's 12 regional reserve banks, grew up in New Jersey, received his PhD in economics from Stanford University, and was working as a professor at the University of Southern California when he was hired for the Atlanta job.
The Fed's Washington-based Board of Governors said last week that it had reappointed all of the 11 other reserve bank presidents to new terms in a unanimous vote.
(Reporting by Howard Schneider; Editing by Andrea Ricci)
