Esther L. George, President and Chief Executive Officer, Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, will be our guest speaker at the Exchequer Club meeting on Wednesday, January 18, 2023.
Esther L. George is president and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. She represents the Tenth District on the Federal Open Market Committee, which has authority over U.S. monetary policy. Prior to her appointment as president on Oct. 1, 2011, she had been the Bank’s chief operating officer since August 2009. In 2022, she is a voting member of the Federal Open Market Committee.
As CEO of the Kansas City Fed, George leads a workforce of more than 2,000 employees located at the Bank’s Kansas City office and Branch offices in Denver, Oklahoma City and Omaha. The Kansas City Fed oversees seven states: western Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Colorado, Wyoming and northern New Mexico. Throughout this region, the Kansas City Fed plays a role in national monetary policy, supervises financial institutions and provides payment and financial services to depository institutions and the U.S. Treasury.
George joined the Fed in 1982 and served much of her career in the Division of Supervision and Risk Management. She began by becoming a commissioned bank examiner and eventually served for ten years as the District’s chief regulator. In that capacity, she was responsible for oversight of the District’s state-chartered member banks and nearly 1,000 bank and financial holding companies, as well as the Bank’s discount window and risk management functions. She was directly involved in the Tenth District’s banking supervision and discount window lending activities during the banking crisis of the 1980s and post-9/11.
She is a former chair of the Federal Reserve System’s Community Banking Organizations Management Group. George has also served as the acting director of the Federal Reserve’s Division of Banking Supervision and Regulation at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System in Washington, D.C.
George is a native of Missouri. Beyond the Tenth Federal Reserve District, she hosts the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City’s annual Jackson Hole Economic Symposium. She has also participated in the Bank for International Settlement’s Financial Stability Institute programs in Lima, Abu Dhabi, Beijing and Malaysia.