Andrew F. Brimmer papers

Andrew F. Brimmer was a prominent economist and educator, with an expertise in international monetary policy. He was born in Newellton, Louisiana on September 13, 1926. After graduating from high school, Brimmer joined the United States Army, serving mostly in Hawaii at the rank of staff sergeant. Through the GI Bill, Brimmer attended the University of Washington earning a Bachelor of Arts in 1950 and a Master of Arts in 1951, both in economics. He was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study economics at the Delhi School of Economics at Delhi University and at the University of Bombay in India from 1951-1952. Upon his return to the United States in 1952, Brimmer enrolled in the Ph.D. program in economics at Harvard University. While studying at Harvard, he served as a research assistant on the India Project at the Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, investigating the economic development of industrializing countries. Brimmer also served a teaching fellow in the economics department at Harvard with a concentration in the macroeconomics and international trade fields. He was awarded his Ph.D. in 1957.

He began his public service career in 1950 as a summer intern at the U.S. Foreign Aid Agency in Washington DC under supervisor Philip S. Brown. He later served as an economist in the research department of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York from 1955-1958. Brimmer's teaching career began in 1958 as Assistant Professor of Economics and Finance at Michigan State University where he stayed for three years before joining the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce at the University of Pennsylvania as an Assistant Professor of Finance in 1961.

In 1963, Brimmer was appointed by President John F. Kennedy Deputy Assistant and Assistant Secretary for Economic Affairs at the U.S. Department of Commerce where he served for three years before he was appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson as the first African-American member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. Leaving the public sector in 1974, Brimmer briefly returned to academia when he was appointed the Thomas Henry Carroll Ford Foundation Visiting Professor at Harvard Business School (HBS) where he taught finance and capital markets from August 1974 to June 1976.

In 1976, he resigned as a professor at HBS to found the Washington D.C. based economic and financial consulting firm, Brimmer & Company. Brimmer had extensive academic and political contacts through his years of service and sought to leverage those relationships. He provided consulting services to private businesses, government agencies, and municipalities with an emphasis on Federal Reserve monetary policy.

Andrew F. Brimmer served on the board of directors of some of the largest and most influential companies in America including DuPont, the Ford Foundation, Equitable Life Assurance Company, United Airlines, Bank of America, BlackRock Inc., International Harvester, Navistar and Gannett Co. Dr. Brimmer was also a member of many non-profit boards including, the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life & History, Leon H. Sullivan Foundation, Tuskegee University, and the Harvard Board of Overseers, among others. Brimmer served as Principal Policy Advisor to the Ministry of Finance of the Government of Bermuda from 1999-2012. He also was a member of many economic and financial professional organizations.

Andrew Brimmer served two more times in a public sector role for the Government as a member of the Commission on Fair Market Value Policy for Federal Coal Leasing in 1983 and subsequently was appointed by President Bill Clinton as Chairman of the District of Columbia Financial Responsibility and Management Assistance Authority, in which he served from 1995 to 1998. His final academic appointment was in 1997 as the Wilmer D. Barrett Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Brimmer retired from the university in 2008.

Brimmer wrote and published more than one hundred journal articles and authored ten books on topics ranging from general economics, monetary theory, central banking, international finance, life insurance in capital markets, and international banking. Throughout his distinguished career, he received 26 honorary degrees including Honorary Doctor of Laws from Harvard and Tuskegee.

Andrew F. Brimmer died on October 7, 2012.