Robert Kaplan, Vice Chairman of Goldman Sachs, and former President of the Dallas Fed

It was a pleasure to welcome Rob Kaplan, Vice Chairman of Goldman Sachs, and former President of the Dallas Fed, to the Alpha Exchange. We begin with Rob’s reflections on his time at the helm of the Dallas Fed from 2015 to 2021, a period spanning rate liftoff, fiscal stimulus, and the COVID crisis. He outlines how his perspective as a business practitioner led him to focus on structural forces—demographics, globalization, and technology—rather than relying solely on cyclical data and economic models. We then turn to the current environment, where the Fed faces a more complex trade-off between inflation and employment. Rob highlights the limits of monetary policy, emphasizing that broader economic outcomes are increasingly shaped by fiscal policy, regulation, and structural trends beyond the Fed’s control. The conversation also explores changes in financial markets, including the diminished influence of Fed policy on the long end of the yield curve, the growing importance of sup...