Loretta Mester

Loretta J. Mester is President and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.

Mester was born in Baltimore, Maryland on October 24, 1958. She is married to George Mailath, who has been extolled as being one of the world’s top game theorists, and an economist at the University of Pennsylvania. Both Loretta and George are avid opera fans. In fact, Mester has – on more than one occasion – cited Richard Wagner’s epic four-opera Ring Cycle as an analogy for the housing boom and crisis.

Mester has a Bachelor of Arts degree (summa cum laude) from Barnard College, Columbia University in Mathematics and Economics and a Masters and Ph.D. in Economics from Princeton University. She was also a National Science Foundation Fellow at Princeton.

Dr. Mester became the President and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland at the beginning of June 2014. She was the 11th president and CEO of Cleveland’s Fourth District Federal Reserve Bank. A year later she took on the additional position of “alternate voting member of the Federal Open Market Committee.”

In her capacity in these leading roles at the Fed, Mester plays an active part in the establishment of U.S. monetary policy, while supervising 950 employees throughout Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh. These staff members engage in economic research, administer banking institutions and prepare payment services to commercial banks and the American government.

As well as her current position with the Fed, Mester is an adjunct professor of finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and a fellow at the Wharton Financial Institutions Center. Other positions Mester holds include: Greater Cleveland Partnership director, a trustee of both the Cleveland Clinic and the Musical Arts Association, a founding director of the Financial Intermediation Research Society, a member of the advisory board of the Financial Intermediation Network of European Studies (FINEST), the American Economic Association, the American Finance Association, the Econometric Society, and the Financial Management Association International.

Mester has published articles in various journals on the subjects of central banking, economics and finance. She is co-editor of the Journal of Financial Services Research and the International Journal of Central Banking. She is an associate editor of: the Journal of Financial Intermediation; Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking; Journal of Financial Services Research; Journal of Economics and Business; Research in Banking and Finance; and Journal of Financial Stability. She is a Co-editor of the International Journal of Central Banking.

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