Randal Quarles Keynote Speaker

Randal Quarles is a private equity investor and attorney. He served as the Federal Reserve System’s first Vice Chairman for Supervision, charged specifically with ensuring stability in the financial sector system.

From October 2017 to October 2021, Randal Quarles was Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve System. Concurrently, he was the successor to Mark Carney as the Chairman of the Financial Stability Board (“FSB”) from December 2018 until December 2021; a global body established after the Great Financial Crisis to coordinate international efforts to enhance financial stability. In both positions, he played a key role in crafting the US and international response to the economic and financial dislocations of COVID-19, successfully preventing widespread global disruption of the financial system.  As FSB Chairman, he was a regular delegate to the finance ministers’ meetings of the G-7 and G20 Groups of nations and to the Summit meetings of the G20.  As Fed Vice Chair, he was a permanent member of the Federal Open Market Committee, the body that sets monetary policy for the United States.

Earlier in his career, Randal Quarles was Under Secretary of the U.S. Treasury, where he led the Department’s activities in financial sector and capital markets policy, including coordination of the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets.

Before serving as Under Secretary, Randal Quarles was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs, where he had a key role in response to several international crises. Randal Quarles was also the U.S. Executive Director of the International Monetary Fund, a member of the Air Transportation Stabilization Board, and board representative for the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. In earlier public service, he was an integral member of the Treasury team in the George H. W. Bush Administration that developed the governmental response to the savings and loan crisis.

Between his tours of duty in public service, Randal Quarles was a partner with the law firm of Davis Polk & Wardwell, working at various times in both the New York and London offices, where he was co-head of the firm’s financial institutions practice and advised on transactions that included a number of the largest financial sector mergers ever completed.

Randal Quarles currently acts as Chairman and co-founder of The Cynosure Group.  Before founding Cynosure, he was a long-time partner of the Carlyle Group, where he began the firm’s program of investments in the financial services industry during the 2008 financial crisis.

Randal Quarles received an A.B. summa cum laude in philosophy and economics from Columbia in 1981 and a J.D. from the Yale Law School in 1984.