William Joseph McDonough

William Joseph McDonough (April 21, 1934 He became an orphan by the age of 11 following the deaths of his mother and his insurance-salesman father.

He received a master's degree in economics from Georgetown University in 1962.

Career Early career McDonough was with the U.S. Navy from 1956 to 1961. During this period he spent time on a destroyer, was stationed in Pearl Harbor, taught at the U.S. Naval Academy, and earned his masters degree by attending night school. Concluding he was unlikely to become CEO of the firm, McDonough retired from First Chicago He was in charge of the bank's open market operations.

He served as president and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York from July 1993 to July 2003. As president of the New York Fed, he also automatically served as the vice chairman and a permanent member of the Federal Open Market Committee, which makes decisions about interest rates.

McDonough also served on the board of directors of the Bank for International Settlements, and as chairman of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision.

As president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, McDonough guided the New York Fed through the 1997 Asian financial crisis,

Career post-Fed In 2003, immediately after leaving the New York Fed, McDonough was appointed as the first chairman of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, a U.S. non-profit regulatory entity created by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 to oversee audits of public companies and broker-dealers. He resigned the post towards the end of 2005.

In January 2006, he was appointed vice chairman of Merrill Lynch and as a senior advisor to its CEO Stanley O'Neal.

Additional posts McDonough was vice chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations,

He was chairman of the Economic Club of New York from 1996 to 2000.

In 2004 he was elected to the board of advisors of the Yale School of Management.

He was chairman of the board of the Investment Committee for the United Nations Joint Staff Pension Fund, and was co-chairman of the United Nations Association of the United States of America (UNA-USA). He was also an emeritus member of the Group of Thirty, an influential Washington-based financial advisory body.

He was also a member of the board of directors of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. He was survived by his wife, Suzanne Clarke McDonough, and six children from a former marriage.