Richard W. Fisher (born 1949)[1] is the former President and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, having served in that post from April 2005 to 2015. He is a Senior Advisor to Barclays Plc, a British bank holding company, a Director of PepsiCo, and a Senior Contributing Editor for CNBC. From 2011 to 2017, he served on the Harvard Board of Overseers.
Leaving Brown Brothers in 1987, Fisher created Fisher Capital Management, and a separate funds-management firm, Fisher Ewing Partners, managing both firms until 1997. In 1993, he was a candidate in the special election for the U.S. Senate seat in Texas, which was vacated by Lloyd Bentsen when the latter became U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, but took fifth place in a 21 candidate field behind State Treasurer Kay Bailey Hutchison, U.S. Senator Bob Krueger, U.S. Congressman Joe Barton, and U.S. Congressman Jack Fields.
The following year, Fisher was a candidate for the same U.S. Senate seat in the regularly scheduled election. Fisher came in second to former Texas Attorney General Jim Mattox in the Democratic Party primary, but won the ensuing run-off election. Fisher lost the general election in a landslide to incumbent Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison having been defeated 61% to 38%.
Transcripts of the Federal Open Market Committee in May 2007 showed Fisher sounded the alarm on the housing crisis even as many of his peers on the Committee expressed doubts: "On the housing front, I have been bearish—more bearish than anybody at this table. I am more concerned than I was before. We can go through the numbers, but I think it is best expressed by the CEO of one of the five big builders, who said that in March he was arguing internally with his board that the headlines were worse than reality and now reality is worse than the headlines."[5]
At the Dallas Fed in 2013, Fisher was outspoken in opposition to the way quantitative easing was being pursued by Fed chair Ben Bernanke and the board.[6]
As U.S. equity markets began to unravel barely two weeks after Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen's December 18 rate hike announcement, Fisher came out on CNBC decrying the Federal Open Market Committee's decision to launch QE3 saying that he, "voted against doing QE3" and that QE3 was, "one step too far."[7] Fisher is also a member of Washington D.C. based think tank the Inter-American Dialogue.[8]
In April 2020, Governor Greg Abbott named Fisher to the Strike Force to Open Texas – a group "tasked with finding safe and effective ways to slowly reopen the state" amid the COVID-19 pandemic in Texas.[9]
Personal life
Fisher is divorced from Nancy Miles Collins, the daughter of former U.S. Congressman James M. Collins.[10] They have four children, including their son, actor Miles Fisher. He married Missy Bailey in July 2017.[11]
^Reality worse than headlines Kristina Peterson, Michael S. Derby, Eric Morath, and Jon Hilsenrath, "Three Stages of Fed Grief: Key Quotes from 2007," Wall Street Journal, January 18, 2013.