However, shortly after his appointment, Miller left the Board of Governors to take position of treasury secretary in the Carter administration, when W. Michael Blumenthal resigned.

His family soon moved to Borger, the largest city in Hutchinson County, Texas, where Miller spent his childhood and picked up the accent he would use into adulthood.

[2] The nascent town experienced an oil boom up until the Great Depression, during which it underwent extensive development under the Work Projects Administration.

After leaving the Coast Guard, Miller enrolled in the Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley and graduated the top of the class of 1952.

Three (Miller, General Electric's Reginald H. Jones, and DuPont's Irving S. Shapiro) were successful CEOs of large corporations.

[14][19][20] Within four days of receiving the short list, President Carter had narrowed it to Miller and the fourth suggestion: Bruce MacLaury, a trained economist with experience at the Treasury under Paul Volcker, at the Brookings Institution, and in different branches of the Federal Reserve System.

[1][21][22] When President Carter looked for a successor to Miller as Federal Reserve Chairman in 1979, MacLaury was on the short list again (the CEOs Jones and Shapiro were not).

[8][21] The announcement received lukewarm reception as US markets slightly worsened, media coverage expressed uncertainty about the relatively unknown nominee's views, and economists' reactions varied.

[25] In this context, Miller sat before the United States Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs for the first-ever confirmation hearings for a Federal Reserve chairman.

[29] In at least one speech, Miller identified inflation as the nation's primary domestic challenge since (in his view) it was the chief obstacle preventing full employment.

For example, he supported the FOMC's continued policy of placing a tight target range around the federal funds rate that underpins much of the financial system.

In November 1978, only 11 months into his term, the dollar had fallen nearly 34% against the German mark and almost 42% against the Japanese yen, prompting the Carter administration to launch a "dollar rescue package" including emergency sales from the U.S. gold stock, borrowing from the International Monetary Fund, and auctions of Treasury securities denominated in foreign currencies.

Even as the situation worsened, Miller insisted that contractionary policies like an overly aggressive interest rate increase would not fight inflation but rather encourage it while hurting the economy's growth.

Treasury Secretary Blumenthal, Inflation Adviser Alfred Kahn, and Chief Presidential Economist Charles Schultze all advocated for increasing the interest rate prior to the April FOMC 1979 meeting, where Miller opposed such measures.

"[40] A 2003 article in The Economist said that "America's central bankers have all made their weight felt across the political sphere, with the possible exception of William Miller, whose brief tenure in 1978-79 was notable for his attempts to ban smoking at the board.".

Steven Beckner, a Federal Reserve analyst, offered a particularly harsh assessment: Under Arthur Burns, who chaired the Fed from 1970 to 1978, and under G. William Miller, who was chairman from January 1978 [Note: obviously an error from Beckner since Miller began in March] to August 1979, the Fed provided the monetary fuel for an inflation that began as a flicker and grew into a fearsome blaze...

Without question the most partisan and least respected chairman in the Fed's history, this former Textron executive worked in tandem with fellow Carter appointee, Treasury Secretary W. Michael Blumenthal, in pursuit of monetary policies that were expansionist domestically and devaluationist internationally.

This attracted some controversy as the bailout was thought to reward mismanagement and impede fair trade relations between the United States and Japan.

Miller agreed that "The administration does not favor, as a general proposition, government aid to private corporations,"[7] but thought an exception should be made in Chrysler's case.

These included treasurer of the American Red Cross, a trustee and director of the Washington Opera, and chairman of the Washington-based H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment.