| Mary C. Daly | |
| Office: | 13th President of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco |
| Term Start: | October 1, 2018 |
| Predecessor: | John C. Williams |
| Birth Place: | Ballwin, Missouri, U.S. |
Mary Colleen Daly (born 1962/1963)[1] is an American economist, who became the 13th President and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco on October 1, 2018.[2] She serves on the Federal Reserve's rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee on a rotating basis.[3] Previously, Daly was the Executive Vice President and Director of Research of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, which she joined as an economist in 1996.
Her research is in the fields of macroeconomics and labor economics and focuses on labor force dynamics and on the impacts of monetary and fiscal policy. She has published influential work on wage, employment, and labor force dynamics, economic inequality, the economics of social security and disability, and evidence-based public policy.[4]
Daly was born in Ballwin, Missouri. Her father was a postal worker and her mother was a homemaker.[5] She said, "we were not poor, but we weren't very wealthy, either. And at some point my family just, sort of, imploded. And my siblings went to live with my grandparents and I went to live with friends. And I dropped out of high school."[5] At the time, she was 15 years of age.[6] By age 16, she was living on her own,[7] working at doughnut shops and retailer Target, struggling to scrape together a full-time salary.[8]
Daly went on to earn a GED and eventually a bachelor's degree in economics and philosophy from the University of Missouri-Kansas City in 1985.[9] She later received a master's degree from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1987 and a Ph.D in economics from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University in 1994.[10] She completed a post-doctoral fellowship at National Institute of Aging at Northwestern University in 1996.[11]
In 1996, Daly joined the San Francisco Fed as a research economist. She steadily rose through the ranks of the research department, becoming Executive Vice President and Director of Research in 2017. Her research has focused on labor market dynamics and the aggregate and distributional impacts of monetary and fiscal policy. She has published work on economic inequality, wage and unemployment dynamics, increasing output through workforce development, and disability and retirement policy.
Daly considers Janet Yellen a mentor, stating that her career "just kind of exploded" after Yellen was named president of the San Francisco Fed in 2004. (Yellen went on to become the Fed's vice chair in 2010, and later its chair in 2014.)
On October 1, 2018, Daly became the 13th President and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, succeeding John C. Williams, who left in June 2018 to become the President and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
In May 2019, Daly served as the commencement speaker at the 165th commencement of Syracuse University.[12] [13]
Daly is the first openly gay woman to lead a regional Federal Reserve bank, joining Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta President Raphael Bostic, who is also openly gay. She is the second woman to lead the San Francisco Fed.
Daly is married and resides in the San Francisco Bay area.