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Also Known As George William Miller, Miller
Former Chair of the Federal Reserve of the United States
George William Miller was an American businessman and investment banker who served as the 65th United States secretary of the treasury from 1979 to 1981. A member of the Democratic Party, he also served as the 11th chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1978 to 1979. Miller was the first person to hold both of those posts.
President Jimmy Carter nominated him to succeed Arthur F. Burns as chairman of the Federal Reserve in 1978. Miller came from a corporate world, rather than from economics or finance, an unusual background for a central bank chairman. However, shortly after his appointment, Miller left the Board of Governors to take position of treasury secretary in the Carter administration, when W. Michael Blumenthal resigned. New York Fed President Paul Volcker was chosen as his successor at the Fed.
Treasury Secretary :
Miller was Fed chairman for just over a year when Carter appointed him Secretary of the Treasury in August 1979, replacing Michael Blumenthal as part of a major cabinet shuffle in which five Cabinet members were replaced. Carter appointed Paul Volcker to replace Miller. He thus became the first person in history to serve as both Treasury Secretary and Chairman of the Federal Reserve. As Treasury Secretary, Miller is best known for his role on the Chrysler Loan Guarantee Board, which oversaw management of a $1.5 billion loan to rescue the carmaker from bankruptcy. This attracted some controversy as the bailout was thought to reward mismanagement and impede fair trade relations between the United States and Japan. Miller agreed that "The administration does not favor, as a general proposition, government aid to private corporations," but thought an exception should be made in Chrysler's case. Chrysler recovered in the early 1980s and paid off the loan early.
Miller is also known for managing the freezing and partial unfreezing of $12 billion in Iranian funds held in the United States during the Iranian hostage crisis. He also pushed through an accord with labor unions on wage-price guidelines that had been "stalemated for months."
Miller's economic policies failed to contain inflation and had little impact on rising unemployment rates. The poor state of the economy was a major factor in Carter's 1980 defeat by Ronald Reagan.
George William Miller was born in Sapulpa, Oklahoma, in 1925. His family soon moved to Borger, the largest city in Hutchinson County, Texas, where Miller spent his childhood and picked up the accent he would use into adulthood. The nascent town experienced an oil boom up until the Great Depression, during which it underwent extensive development under the Work Projects Administration. Miller's father, previously a cab driver, became the town's fire chief. After attending Amarillo College for the 1941–1942 school year, he received an appointment to the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, and he graduated from there in 1945 with a B.S. degree in marine engineering. From 1945 to 1949, Miller served as a Coast Guard officer in Asia and on the U.S. West Coast. During his time with the Coast Guard, he met Ariadna Rogojarsky, a Russian emigre; they married in 1946.
After leaving the Coast Guard, Miller enrolled in the Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley and graduated the top of the class of 1952. From there he joined the law firm of Cravath, Swaine & Moore in New York City.
In 1956, Miller joined the rapidly growing Rhode Island-based conglomerate Textron, Inc as an assistant secretary. He became a vice president of the company in 1957, CFO in 1958, and both the COO and company president in 1960. In the following years, Textron's sales boomed across a range of consumer goods, industrial equipment, and aerospace products. He became Textron's CEO in 1968 and retained that role following his 1974 election as chairman of Textron's board of directors. He held these posts until he joined to the Federal Reserve Board. Despite the economy's weakening state during his time as CEO, Textron's sales grew 65% to $2.8bn as the company operated 180 plants worldwide. This allowed the company's sales and net income to keep pace with the decade's accelerating inflation (albeit with a temporary dip in inflation-adjusted net income during the 1973-75 recession).
In Providence, Miller was active in the Central Congregational Church.
Miller also forayed into politics and public service. From 1963 to 1965, Miller was Chairman of the Industry Advisory Council of the President's Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity. In 1966 and 1967, he was a member of the National Council on the Humanities. Miller also served in the think tank Club of Rome. In 1968, he aided Hubert Humphrey's presidential campaign as chairman of a Democratic-leaning business group. He also played a minor role in Jimmy Carter's 1976 presidential campaign. After Carter's election, Miller chaired the President's Committee on HIRE, which tried to explore the issues surrounding veteran employment.
At the time he joined the Washington-based Federal Reserve Board of Governors in 1978, Miller had been a Class B director of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston for about eight years (Textron's headquarters is in the Boston Fed's district), and he was on the board of several corporations. He was also a member of the Business Council and the Business Roundtable, and he was Chairman of both the Conference Board and the National Alliance of Businessmen. He also served on two bilateral international economic councils: the US-USSR Trade and Economic Council and the Polish-US Economic Council.
