E. Gerald Corrigan Former President (1980-1984)

E. Gerald Corrigan took office Aug. 1, 1980, as the 10th president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. Previously, he had served at the New York Federal Reserve Bank for 12 years, as Research economist, personnel officer, vice president in charge of the open market trading desk and, ultimately, senior vice president. He was on leave as a special adviser to then-Fed Chairman Paul Volcker when he was appointed to the Ninth District position.

During Corrigan’s tenure, a major change in the nation’s banking system occurred with the passage in 1980 of the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act. To comply with this act, the Fed had to price its financial services, establish reserve requirements for all eligible financial institutions and offer financial services to all depository institutions. Corrigan wrote extensively about what this meant to financial institutions and to the Federal Reserve System, particularly in the Minneapolis Fed’s 1980, ’81 and ’82 annual reports.

Corrigan was born in Waterbury, Conn., and holds a Ph.D. in economics from Fordham University. He had lived on the East Coast until he came to the Minneapolis Fed. In the 75th anniversary edition of The Region magazine, published by the Minneapolis Fed, Corrigan said, “I came to know something of the communities across the district in which [the bank’s directors] lived and worked. In good times and in bad, one could not help but be struck by the extent to which attitudes in those communities were forged by a balance of realism, vision and purpose. Those traits have obvious value in their own right, but they can also be viewed as something of a credo for central banking since the essence of sound monetary policy is often to be found in the ability of policy-makers to take the longer view of things and to temper one’s hopes and expectations by what is realistic and what is pragmatic.”

He resigned from the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank to assume the presidency of the New York Federal Reserve Bank in 1985.