Robert Kaplan

Robert Kaplan served as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas from 2015 to 2021. He previously was a professor at Harvard Business School and vice chairman of Goldman Sachs. Kaplan was known for integrating corporate strategy perspectives into his economic analysis and for being thoughtful about emerging risks in the economy. He resigned in September 2021 after disclosures that he had traded in individual stocks and S&P 500 futures while the Federal Reserve was conducting extraordinary policy interventions — prompting an ethics review and eventual reform of Fed officials' trading rules. At Harvard Business School, he co-taught a popular leadership course and wrote extensively about leadership under uncertainty. His academic and banking background made him an articulate communicator about the structural economic shifts — automation, aging demographics, and globalization — that he believed were suppressing the economy's neutral rate. His Dallas Fed produced substantial research on the energy economy and Texas's growth dynamics. After resigning, he returned to Harvard to continue teaching and writing on leadership.