Neel Kashkari

His parents are Kashmiri Hindus who were born and raised in Srinagar in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir and immigrated to the United States in 1964.

They settled in Stow, a suburb of Akron, where Neel Kashkari grew up.

His parents were well known within the local community of Indian Hindus.

His older sister, Meera Kashkari Kelley, is a physician specializing in infectious diseases.

Growing up, Neel's parents and sister were liberal, but his free-market views led him to identify more with the Republican Party.

Kashkari attended Stow–Munroe Falls High School before transferring to the Western Reserve Academy.

Neel Tushar Kashkari (born July 30, 1973) is an American banker, economist and politician who is the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.

Kashkari was born on July 30, 1973, in Akron, Ohio, to Sheila Kashkari, a pathologist at Akron City Hospital, and Chaman Kashkari, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Akron.

He graduated in 1991 with honors in mathematics and was elected graduation speaker.

Kashkari earned bachelor’s (1995) and master’s (1998) degrees in mechanical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.

He was the team leader for the mechanical engineering component of the school's entry in the 1997 Sunrayce, a solar-powered vehicle race.

After completing his master's degree, Kashkari moved to Redondo Beach, California, and worked as an engineer for TRW Inc., a contractor for NASA.

There he worked on a stabilizing component for the James Webb Space Telescope.

Kashkari left TRW to enter the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, earning an MBA in 2002.

At Wharton he was president of the Finance Club and was part of the student organizing team for the annual Wharton Finance Conference.

Kashkari interned at the investment bank Goldman Sachs during the summer between his two academic years at Wharton.

After graduation from Wharton in 2002, he joined Goldman's San Francisco office as an associate covering software companies in the investment banking division.

In this role, he was part of the team that advised clients on mergers and acquisitions, as well as other financial matters, until leaving the firm in 2006.

He was a regional finalist for the White House Fellows program.

In May 2006 President George W. Bush announced his intention to appoint Paulson as Secretary of the Treasury.

Kashkari contacted Paulson and asked to join him at Treasury.

Despite not knowing Kashkari well, Paulson agreed to meet with him, and much later offered him a job as a policy generalist.

Kashkari accepted, and then Paulson remembered to confirm that Kashkari was a Republican.

After the U.S. Senate confirmed Paulson, he and Kashkari started at Treasury on the same day.

Kashkari was one of several Goldman employees who followed Paulson to Treasury.

Kashkari began as a special assistant to Paulson working on energy policy.

He and Allan B. Hubbard developed Bush's "Twenty in Ten" plan to promote energy conservation.

As interim Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Financial Stability from October 2008 to May 2009, he oversaw the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) that was a major component of the U.S. government's response to the Financial crisis of 2007–2008.

Kashkari left government and began working for Pimco in 2009, leading that company's push into the equities market.

In 2009, he described his high school grades as not good enough to apply to top-tier universities.

He resigned from Pimco in January 2013 to explore a run for public office.

One year later, he announced his candidacy for Governor of California.

He came in second in California's nonpartisan blanket primary but lost the general election to incumbent governor Jerry Brown.

A Republican, he unsuccessfully ran for Governor of California in the 2014 election.

Born and raised in Ohio, and educated at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Kashkari worked initially as an aerospace engineer.

After attending business school at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, he became an investment banker, covering the information technology security sector for Goldman Sachs.

Henry Paulson, the former head of Goldman, and then Secretary of the Treasury, hired Kashkari as an aide.

Kashkari was eventually named Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for International Economics and Development.

At Treasury, he played a number of roles in the response to the financial crisis and the subprime mortgage crisis that preceded it, most notably administering the TARP.

He was named the new president of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve November 10, 2015, succeeding Narayana Kocherlakota who announced his resignation in June.