Kevin Warsh

Kevin Maxwell Warsh (born April 13, 1970) is an American financier and bank executive who served as a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors from 2006 to 2011.

He received a Bachelor of Arts in public policy from Stanford University in 1992 with a concentration in economics and political science.

He then attended Harvard Law School and graduated cum laude with a J.D. in 1995.

He also took coursework in market economics and debt capital markets at MIT Sloan School of Management and Harvard Business School.

From 1995 to 2002, Warsh worked for Morgan Stanley in New York City, rising to executive director in the company's mergers and acquisitions department.

From 2002 to 2006, Warsh was Special Assistant to the President for Economic Policy, and Executive Secretary of the National Economic Council.

His primary areas of responsibility included domestic finance, banking and securities regulatory policy, and consumer protection.

He advised the President and senior administration officials on issues related to the U.S. economy, particularly fund flows in the capital markets, securities, banking, and insurance issues.

Warsh participated in the President's Working Group on Financial Markets and served as the administration's chief liaison to the independent financial regulatory agencies.

President Bush nominated Warsh and Randall Kroszner to fill two Fed vacancies on January 27, 2006.

Warsh's nomination drew some criticism, based on his age and inexperience.

At 35 years old, Warsh was the youngest appointment in the history of the Federal Reserve.

At the time, former Fed vice chairman and Reagan appointee Preston Martin said Warsh's nomination was "not a good idea" and that if he had a voice in the Senate, he would vote no. Ben Bernanke wrote "His youth generated some criticism, including from former Board vice chairman Preston Martin, but Kevin's political and markets savvy and many contacts on Wall Street would prove to be invaluable."

In his confirmation documents, Warsh listed two published writings - "Deciding to Run for Congress: An Opportunity Cost Model with Partisan Implications" and "Corporate Spinoffs and Mass Tort Liability."

At his confirmation hearing on February 14, 2006, Warsh touted his experience on Wall Street: "I hope that my prior experience on Wall Street, particularly my nearly 7 years at Morgan Stanley, would prove beneficial to the deliberations and communications of the Federal Reserve."

He took office on February 24, 2006, to fill an unexpired term ending January 31, 2018.

His first meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), the Fed's policymaking body, was in March 2006.

In 2007, Warsh returned to upstate New York and spoke about serving at the Federal Reserve: "I have been honored to serve in Washington, D.C. for the past 5-1/2 years. My knowledge of the economy has deepened by working with my colleagues to put fiscal and monetary policy into practice.  Nonetheless, with each passing day, it is more obvious that I learned much of what I need to know about the real economy in my first eighteen years here in upstate New York."

In March 2007 - less than a year before the rescue of Bear Stearns - Governor Warsh spoke about market liquidity:

Warsh played a significant role in navigating the financial market turmoil of 2007 and 2008.

According to author David Wessel, "Warsh established himself as the chairman's protector in Republican circles and Bernanke's bridge to Wall Street chief executives."

Bernanke would write "Don Kohn, my vice chairman, with his long experience at the Fed, and Kevin Warsh, with his many Wall Street and political contacts and his knowledge of practical finance, were my most frequent companions on the endless conference calls through which we shaped our crisis-fighting strategy."

During the crisis Warsh tried to engineer mergers between Citigroup and Goldman Sachs and Wachovia and Goldman Sachs.

These efforts failed.

During and in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, Warsh acted as the central bank's primary liaison to Wall Street and served as the Federal Reserve's representative to the Group of Twenty (G-20) and as the Board's emissary to the emerging and advanced economies in Asia.

Prior, he served as Special Assistant to the President for Economic Policy and Executive Secretary of the White House National Economic Council.

Warsh is currently the Shepard Family Distinguished Visiting Fellow in Economics at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, a scholar and lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, a member of the Group of Thirty, a member of the Panel of Economic Advisers of the Congressional Budget Office, and a former steering committee member of the Bilderberg Group.

He has conducted research in the field of economics and finance, and has advised several private and public companies.

Warsh was born in Albany, New York, the youngest of three children of Judith and Robert Warsh.

He was raised in nearby in Loudonville, New York and graduated from Shaker High School in Latham.

Warsh is Jewish.

On September 20, 2008, he was granted a waiver to deal with his former employer Morgan Stanley.

The next day Morgan Stanley was converted into a bank holding company in order to access Federal Reserve loans, in effect saving the firm.

According to the Wall Street Journal, "Timothy Geithner, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and Kevin Warsh, a Fed governor and former Morgan Stanley executive, worked in New York to sort out the details with Goldman and Morgan Stanley."

The editors summarized the decision-making, "Mr. Warsh was part of former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke's inner circle during the worst of the panic. Having worked at Morgan Stanley, he provided crucial insight into the real condition of Wall Street, and well before the panic he told his Fed colleagues that the financial system was vastly undercapitalized. 'I think, most fundamentally, that the business model of investment banks has been threatened, and I suspect the existing business model will not endure through this period,' Mr. Warsh told a Fed meeting on March 18, 2008."

Warsh was tasked by Bernanke to help devise a financial reform program to mitigate the risks of future trouble.

Bernanke wrote “In late 2008, amid the crisis firefighting, we at the Fed began working on our own proposals for financial reform.

I wanted to have a well formulated position before the legislative debates went into high gear.

Kevin Warsh led a committee of Board members and Reserve Bank presidents that laid out some key principles.

Kevin's committee considered a more explicitly 'macroprudential' or system-wide, approach to supervision and regulation.