CEOs are gravitating towards that dark horse candidate, current Fed Governor Chris Waller, because while he may lack the White House network of other top contenders; he is quickly emerging as perhaps the only candidate who can cut interest rates with broad-based credibility and build broad consensus around those needed rate cuts, both at the Fed as well as across corporate America and within financial markets.
Chris Waller is perhaps the only choice for Fed Chair who can thread the needle. Unlike other top contenders, Waller’s calls for rates to come down reflect not convenient political posturing nor obsequious flattery, but genuine intellectual conviction. Waller has been incredibly consistent and correctly prescient across his entire career at the Fed; he correctly pointed to signs that the economy, and in particular employment, was softening, and has been calling for rates to come down for far longer than any of his peers at the Fed.
Yet, at the same time, Waller has emphasized and defended central bank independence time and time again, building off his own academic research which was focused on the importance of central bank independence. Indeed, prior to Waller’s public service at the Fed starting in 2009, he was a renowned academic with a long track record of groundbreaking economic research, including as professor and the Gilbert F. Schaefer Chair of Economics at the University of Notre Dame.
Many CEOs at our Yale CEO Summit expressed their appreciation for Waller’s long track record of partnering effectively with business leaders on challenges as well as opportunities. Take crypto innovation as one such example. As the Fed Governor who oversees the payment system, Waller was once again correctly prescient as an advocate of stablecoins dating back to before 2021, when few knew what stablecoins even were, and he convened the first ever Payments Innovation Conference earlier this year, bringing in top leaders from industry to help shape the future of stablecoin payments.
President Harry Truman lamented, “Give me a one-handed economist. All my economists say, ‘on ONE hand…’, then ‘but on the other.’” Business leaders appreciate Waller’s serious and decisive style, his systemic economic knowledge, his track record of constructive engagement, his clarity of message, and his credible presence, which transcend political or personal career agendas.
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
