“Explaining to the public the costs of even modest rates of inflation is a vital part of Fed communication,” he wrote.

“So, too, is anchoring inflation expectations with a description of the range the central bank finds acceptable.”

FROM SWEET HOME ORLANDO TO FAIR HARVARD

Hubbard was born on September 4, 1958, in Orlando, Fla. Raised in the nearby suburb of Apopka, he attended public school there and matriculated at UCF.

Kenneth R. White, who was one of Hubbard’s early professors in the UCF business college, lauds Hubbard as “the single best student the college produced in our 37 years of offering classes.”

One particular memory of Hubbard sticks out for White.

“I remember that a statistics professor told me that he had made a mistake in his lecture that he thought no student would be able to catch,” White wrote in an e-mail. “Glenn caught it and in a nice way informed the instructor of the error.”

Hubbard graduated summa cum laude with a degree in economics from UCF in 1979.

When Hubbard applied to the top economics graduate schools in the country, White and the rest of the faculty at the UCF business college knew he would be up to the challenge.

“When undergraduate students talk about going to MIT or Harvard, we tend to think that these students are over-reaching their goals,” White says. “Not so with Glenn—Harvard and MIT were in a very heated competition to receive Glenn as a graduate student.”

Morris University Professor Dale W. Jorgenson, who taught Hubbard in an econometrics course, remembers Hubbard’s “outstanding educational skills.”

“He was one of the best people we had of his generation,” Jorgenson says.

While at Harvard, Hubbard was also a teaching fellow in economics and a resident tutor in Dunster House.

Hubbard’s graduate dissertation, “Three Essays on Government Debt and Asset Markets,” was supervised by Maier Professor of Political Economy Benjamin M. Friedman ’66, visiting professor Jerry A. Hausman, and Baker Professor of Economics Martin S. Feldstein ’61.

Hausman, a professor at MIT who visited Harvard in 1982-83, recalls that Hubbard was “clearly among the best people in his class.”