William L. Rutledge, executive vice president and head of Bank Supervision at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, today announced his intention to retire at the end of this year.
“The passage of regulatory reform is an important milestone that creates new challenges and opportunities for Bank Supervision,” said Rutledge. “After having spent many wonderful years at the New York Fed, I believe this is the right moment to announce the change to pass the torch on to a new generation of leadership in the Group at year-end.”
Rutledge joined the Bank in 1974 as an economist in the banking studies department and held many senior positions within the Bank Supervision Group, including those with management responsibility for financial examinations, banking applications, specialized examinations, compliance, supervision support, community affairs and foreign banks. He was appointed head of the Group in 1999.
During Rutledge’s time as head of Bank Supervision, the New York Fed developed a specialist approach to supervising banks involving experts in credit risk, market risk, operational and compliance risk, as well as relationship managers. The Bank also pioneered the concept of horizontal reviews, evaluating cross sections of firms to determine current best practices in the sector to provide perspective for supervising individual firms and to inform policymakers on the need for changing broad policies.
Following the onset of the financial crisis in 2007-08, the New York Fed worked to incorporate macroeconomic and financial markets insight more deeply into its supervisory activities. In early 2009, the Bank Supervision Group under Rutledge’s leadership played an important role in the Supervisory Capital Assessment Program-known as the bank “stress tests”-that helped to restore confidence in the U.S. financial system.
D.C.