H. Robert Heller
German American economist, banker, and author
Heinz Robert Heller (born January 8, 1940) is an economist who served as a governor of the Federal Reserve System and as president of VISA U.S.A. Inc.
Education
Heller was born in Cologne, Germany. After an early education in Cologne, he emigrated in 1960 to the United States and obtained his B.A. in 1961 from Parsons College, M.A. in economics from the University of Minnesota (1962) and his Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Berkeley (1965).
Career
Heller began his career as an academic, first as assistant professor (1965–68) and associate professor (1968–71) of economics at the University of California, Los Angeles and then as professor of economics at the University of Hawaii (1971–74), where he served as chairman of the economics department for two years. From 1974 to 1978, he was chief of the Financial Studies Division of the Research Department of the International Monetary Fund in Washington, D.C., in charge of the IMF's monetary and financial research program. In 1978, he joined Bank of America in San Francisco as senior vice president and director of international economic research. At Bank of America, he was a member of the Management Advisory Council, the International Money Policy Committee, the Trust and Investment Policy Committee, the International Banking Council and the Policy Research Council. He also was chairman of both the Foreign Exchange Outlook Committee and the Country Risk Rating Committee.
President Reagan nominated Heller in 1986 as a member of the board of governors of the Federal Reserve System and he was confirmed unanimously by the U.S. Senate
At the Federal Reserve he served as the administrative governor and the chairman of the Committee on Bank Supervision and Regulation. He was a member of the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council and a Federal Reserve delegate to the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development in Paris.
“H. Robert Heller” enters the record as german American economist, banker, and author. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Robert, Heller and German can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16800894. VIAF identifies the subject as 49961289. The Library of Congress control number is n79043356. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1940, 1960, 1961 and 1962.
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This entry incorporates text from “H. Robert Heller” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.