Utah native to leave job with Treasury
For Randal Quarles, Treasury undersecretary for domestic finance, managing the government's debt has been part of a day's work.
In his nearly six years at Treasury, Quarles, a Utah native, has played major roles in everything from Chinese currency issues and the World Bank to the International Monetary Fund and G8 summits.
But come Friday, Quarles will leave all of that behind. In August, he submitted his resignation to President Bush.
The return to private life will, no doubt, be a dramatic change. But for Quarles, life has been full of contrasts.
The 49-year-old was born in San Francisco but raised in Roy. His father worked at Hill Air Force Base as a small-business administrator.
Quarles graduated from Roy High School, going on to Columbia University and then to Yale, where he received his law degree.
"Perhaps the biggest jump was to go to college in New York City," Quarles said in a phone interview. "A lot of my career, a lot of my life has been spent translating one part of the country for the other, sort of explaining New York to people back in Utah and explaining Utah and the West to people on the East Coast."
"Randy has played a major role in an unusually broad range of matters," Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said in a prepared statement. "I was disappointed to learn that Randy had long planned to return to the private sector. ... Over the long term, I will continue to rely on his advice and counsel."
Quarles attributes his success to avoiding what he calls the "logical track."
"One of the things that I've always tried to do with a lot of decisions I've made about my career is to kind of yank myself off of what would seem the path of least resistance," Quarles said. "The biggest contrast one could imagine from Roy, Utah, was New York City."
After achieving success at a New York law firm, Quarles was not content with what appeared to be the logical course of working toward "partner," instead opting to work in the George H.W. Bush Administration in Treasury.
"And so I made the decision, as a six-year associate, to say, 'I'm going to take some time to come down to Washington,"' Quarles said. "It was viewed as neutral at the law firm. It wasn't viewed as advantageous. But I found it enormously valuable personally and professionally to yank myself off of that track."
Prior to his duties as undersecretary, Quarles served as assistant secretary of the Treasury for international affairs and as U.S. executive director of the International Monetary Fund.
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