He also helped design more neutral, standardized language that enables the Fed to offer its view of the "balance of risks" to the economy without it being seen as a commitment to future action.
"I can tell you from hard experience that this was not an easy thing to do," Blinder said. "It's a good policy and it was done with very little rancor and pretty near unanimity."
Under Ferguson, the Fed has reduced three management support divisions into one, and introduced more specific budget and staff development objectives for managers. And he won Congressional support to buy a third Fed building in Washington, saving money spent leasing office space.
"It's a big bureaucracy and a bureaucracy in the process of change," said Alice Rivlin, Ferguson's predecessor at the Fed.
"Roger brought a good management sense and there's been some reorganization and rejuvenation."
Ferguson has also taken the lead on less-glamorous aspects of the Fed's work: bank regulation, electronic commerce, the payments system, and the politically hazardous arenas of bank consolidation and cross-continental mergers.
He "has provided real leadership on financial services and real wisdom on monetary policy," said former US Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, a former Harvard classmate of Ferguson. "He has probably been as influential and successful as any vice chairman in history."
Ferguson graduated from Harvard University in 1973, later earning a law degree and a PhD in economics from the same school.
His interest in the Fed started as a teenager in the 1960s, when the first African-American Fed governor, Andrew Brimmer, was nominated to the board.
"I implicitly recognize what the civil rights leaders of the 1960s recognized, which is that many issues that appear to be race-related are in fact socio-economic in character and origin," Ferguson told the Coalition of Black Investors last year.
Some want Ferguson to use his position to do more to address those issues. The National Bankers Association, a Washington-based trade group representing minority-owned banks, wants the Fed vice chairman to better understand the problems facing US minority-owned banks.
"We would welcome the opportunity to provide him with more information about our segment of the banking industry and if it moved him to be an advocate, so be it," said James Young, the group's chairman and chief executive of Atlanta-based Citizens Bancshares Corp, one of the oldest black-owned banks in the US.
"I don't think necessarily that he wants to be regarded as the black member of the Federal Reserve."
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