The Education of Susan Collins

○ For the Boston Fed’s new president, the study of economics began during family vacations

Susan Collins, who made history in July when she became the first Black woman to lead a regional Federal Reserve bank, was a kid visiting family in Jamaica when she got some introductory lessons in topics that would reappear throughout her professional career: inequality, foreign exchange crises and the real-life effects of monetary policy.

Watching Jamaicans struggle after the country introduced a new currency in 1969, and recognizing that even those with means still had to cope with power outages and water shutoffs, she started to understand that intelligence and resources aren’t always enough to help people overcome circumstances beyond their control. “Seeing the impact that that had on families, on communities, the impact that had on the economy,” said the Boston Fed president about the currency overhaul during an interview with Bloomberg News in November. “That was something that I had a lot of questions about growing up.”

Collins got to delve deeper into the subject while studying toward her Ph.D. at Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Her doctoral dissertation was about currency crises and exchange rate management.