William Joseph McDonough

William Joseph McDonough (April 21, 1934 – January 22, 2018) was an American economist. He was president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York from 1993 to 2003.

He was also a former vice chairman and special advisor to the chairman at Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc., responsible for assisting senior management in the company's business development efforts with governments and financial institutions.

Education
McDonough earned a bachelors degree in economics from the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1956.

He received a masters degree in economics from Georgetown University in 1962.

He also served as an advisory board member for the Yale School of Management.

Career
McDonough was with the U.S. Navy from 1956 to 1961. During this period he spent time on a destroyer, was stationed in Pearl Harbor, taught at the U.S. Naval Academy, and earned his masters degree by attending night school.

He was with the U.S. State Department from 1961 to 1967, and became fluent in Spanish and French. He was sent to Uruguay as a diplomat, and also worked in Washington D.C. on Latin American policy.

First Chicago Corporation and its bank, First National Bank of Chicago, needed someone with economic skills and international experience, and hired McDonough in 1967. First Chicago initially sent him to Paris and then London, before bringing him back to the head office in the U.S., where he rose to vice chairman of the corporation in 1986. Concluding he was unlikely to become CEO of the firm, McDonough retired from First Chicago in 1989 after a 22-year career there.

Before joining the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, McDonough served as an advisor to a variety of domestic and international organizations.

McDonough joined the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in 1992 as executive vice president, head of the bank's markets group and manager of the Federal Open Market Committee‘s (FOMC) open market operations. He served as president and chief executive officer from July 1993 to July 2003. As president, he served as the vice chairman and a permanent member of the FOMC, which formulates U.S. monetary policy. McDonough also served on the board of directors of the Bank for International Settlements and as chairman of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision.

From 2003 to 2005, he was chairman of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, a private-sector, not-for-profit corporation created by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 to oversee auditors of public companies.

McDonough was a member of the board of directors of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. He was chairman of the Investment Committee for the United Nations Joint Staff Pension Fund, and was co-chairman of the United Nations Association of the United States of America (UNA-USA). He was also an emeritus member of the Group of Thirty, an influential Washington-based financial advisory body, and was a director of the Council on Foreign Relations since 1995.

Personal life
McDonough resided in Westchester County, New York, with his wife, Suzanne Clarke McDonough since 2005. He died January 22, 2018, at his home in Waccabuc, New York.