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James Bullard

President & CEO

James Bullard is president and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, positions he has held since 2008. In these roles, he participates in the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) and directs the activities of the Federal Reserve’s Eighth District head office in St. Louis and branches in Little Rock, Ark., Louisville, Ky., and Memphis, Tenn. An economist and monetary policy scholar, Dr. Bullard has been with the Bank since 1990. His research has appeared in numerous professional journals, including the American Economic Review, the Journal of Monetary Economics, Macroeconomic Dynamics and the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking. He has been a peer reviewer for more than two dozen periodicals and institutions, and currently is co-editor of the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control. In addition, Bullard has participated in more than 150 conferences, symposia and lectures sponsored by foreign central banks, academic institutions and monetary policy groups around the world. Bullard has called for the FOMC, the Fed’s monetary policymaking body, to adopt state-contingent policy, which is policy that is adjusted based on the state of the economy, and to give greater consideration to headline inflation than core inflation when making monetary policy decisions. He discussed the reasons to de-emphasize core inflation in his paper “Measuring Inflation: The Core Is Rotten,” published in 2011 in the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis’ Review. In the wake of the financial crisis, he supported quantitative easing and warned about the possibility of the United States’ falling into a Japanese-style deflationary trap. The latter was the subject of his paper “Seven Faces of ‘The Peril’,” published in 2010 in the Review. Beyond the Fed, Bullard is an honorary professor of economics at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also sits on the advisory councils of the economics department and of the Olin Business School’s Center for Finance and Accounting Research. He is a member of the University of Missouri-St. Louis Chancellor’s Council and serves on the boards of the St. Louis Regional Chamber and of the United Way of Greater St. Louis. A native of Forest Lake, Minn., Bullard received his doctorate in economics from Indiana University in Bloomington. He holds Bachelor of Science degrees in economics and in quantitative methods and information systems from St. Cloud State University in St. Cloud, Minn.