Beth Hammack could have been the CFO of Goldman Sachs and become the most powerful woman in American banking. But he missed that train in 2021, and instead has become the latest signing of the Federal Reserve. And, in its second meeting, it has decided become the ‘rebel hawk’ who dissents from the rate cut approved yesterday, making its position clear as soon as it arrived.
This Wednesday’s meeting was already perfectly choreographed. The rate drop of 25 basis points was taken for granted, and 97% of market operators already discounted it. In these circumstances, asking to keep rates unchanged is a ‘hawkish’ position that requires a lot of courage. And Hammack, precisely the ‘newbie’ of the meeting, was the one who launched the request.
Hammack He joined Goldman Sachs in 1993 as a debt markets analyst, and there he began a career that led him to manage a series of financial instruments that were key during the financial crisis 15 years later: repo, short-term markets, interest rates and options. In total, 15 years seeing how to make money with them, as an analyst and managing director, and another 15 seeing how to recover from the collapse of that systemalready promoted to partner of the firm, in charge of cooperating with regulators and the Government in all financial matters where Goldman occupies a key position.
His turning point came in 2021, when Stephen Scherr resigned as the bank’s chief financial officer. No woman in history has been president, CEO or CFO of Goldman Sachs, and Hammack was on the shortlist. But The glass ceiling resisted and Hammack received a consolation position. as co-head of global finance. A position that was too small for him and that made him resign as soon as he had an opportunity.
That occasion came in may of this yearwhen the Cleveland Fed offered to replace Loretta Mester as president of the institution when she retired in August. Mester had been at the Fed since 1985 and already knew how to find every switch blindly, while Hammack was the opposite extreme: a person who had spent his entire career in the private sector and arrived completely new. However, they seem to agree on something: Mester was known as one of the central bank ‘hawks’, and Hammack has decided to declare herself as such at the first opportunity.
The question is what will he do in the next meetings?when everything is up in the air and no one knows exactly what the Fed will do yet: keep rates fixed for one or two meetings, lower them twice or less, recalibrate everything according to how Donald Trump’s policies affect the economy… For the moment , there is already a sign of where the shots can go.
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