Raphael W. Bostic

Raphael W. Bostic became the 15th president and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta on June 5, 2017, the first African American and first openly gay president of a regional Federal Reserve Bank.

Bostic, born on June 5, 1966, studied economics and psychology at Harvard University and earned his economics doctorate at Stanford in 1995. After working as a Federal Reserve Board economist, he joined the University of Southern California in 2001, where he later held the Judith and John Bedrosian Chair in Governance and the Public Enterprise at the Price School of Public Policy. His research examined home ownership, housing finance and neighborhood change. From 2009 to 2012, he served as the Department of Housing and Urban Development's assistant secretary for policy development and research, a principal adviser to the department secretary, helping inform the department's policy decisions. He had earlier worked at HUD as a special assistant in the same policy office.

At the Atlanta Fed, he led one of the twelve regional reserve banks for nearly nine years, taking part in the institution's monetary policy deliberations and its supervision of financial institutions in the Southeast. His speeches there included a 2021 address on bringing one's whole self to work, preserved in the bank's speech archive. He stepped down on February 28, 2026, after announcing his retirement in November 2025 at the end of his term.