When the Federal Reserve finishes a two-day meeting tomorrow and announces to an anxiously waiting world whether it is cutting interest rates for a sixth time this year, the statement explaining its decision will, of course, reflect the thinking of Alan Greenspan, the central bank's chairman.
But it will also bear the fingerprints of Donald L. Kohn, an economist who is little known outside the Fed but who, within it, is among Greenspan's most trusted advisers.
Hewing strictly to the Washington code that staff people should keep their names out of the newspapers -- and never claim credit for the work they do on behalf of their better-known bosses -- Kohn has long resisted efforts to drag him into the limelight.
Once talked into an interview in his spacious but spare office a floor above the boardroom where the Fed makes its interest rate decisions, he is gracious but circumspect, clearly more comfortable discussing the latest trend in productivity than himself.
He is an avid sailor. He is a proud but youthful grandfather at 58. He is still a little awed to find himself at ground zero of economic policymaking but professes to be comfortable with the pressure that comes with the task of helping to keep the nation's prosperity intact.
"I have on occasion said to my wife that I couldn't have imagined in the late 1960s, as I was studying monetary policy ... that I would actually be sitting around the table, talking to and briefing the people making that policy."
Throughout Greenspan's 14-year tenure as Fed chairman, Kohn has counseled the central bank's board of governors on monetary policy and in recent years has emerged as the most influential of the 220 economists who serve on the Fed's staff in Washington.
As director of the Fed's division of monetary affairs, he was at Greenspan's side when the stock market melted down in 1987. He was there as the Fed coped with the deep troubles that afflicted banks in the early 1990s. He helped shape the response to the global financial crisis in 1998.
Now, as he works with Greenspan and other Fed officials to keep the slowing economy from sinking into recession, Kohn is leaving his position in monetary affairs to take on an amorphous but potentially more influential role as adviser to the central bank's board.
The change is intended to give Kohn more time to act as a sounding board, researcher and intellectual sparring partner for Greenspan and the Fed's other governors as they seek to understand the changing economy and the ways interest rate policy can affect it.
He will also continue to play a role in drafting testimony, speeches and the statements the Fed issues each time it meets to reconsider interest rates. (Whether Kohn contributes to Greenspan's often tortured syntax and studied ambiguity or fights to minimize them remains their secret.)
"My expertise is in taking the inputs from other people and trying to figure out the monetary policy implications, the strategy and tactics of policy under these circumstances," Kohn said. "That's what I'd like to have more time to think about."
There has long been speculation and debate among Fed watchers about the degree of influence exerted by staff members over Greenspan and the other governors. Inside the Fed, some governors have complained that the staff was controlled too much by Greenspan. Unlike the governors, who are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, staff members are not subject to direct public oversight. But they participate in the most secret debates in an institution that does most of its work behind closed doors.
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