Simon Potter, an economist, worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York for more than two decades. Leading up to the Global Financial Crisis, he was the New York Fed’s associate director of economic research; in 2010, he became director. In 2012, he shifted to become the head of the markets group, putting him at the helm of the Fed’s open markets operations, the mechanism by which the central bank steers monetary policy and interest rates. He moved to the private sector in 2019. For this April 2021 Lessons Learned interview, he emphasized that these are his personal opinions, based on his former roles at the Fed and not on any current position