[1] He lived with an aunt and worked as a newspaper delivery-boy before attending Campion High School in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin,[1] where he was first in his class for four years.

[1] For his academic achievements, he was admitted to the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, and earned a bachelor's degree in 1956.

[3][1] First Chicago initially sent him to Paris and then London, before bringing him back to the head office in the U.S., where he rose to vice chairman of the corporation[3] in 1986.

[9] As president of the New York Fed, he also automatically served as the vice chairman and a permanent member of the Federal Open Market Committee, which makes decisions about interest rates.

[7] His most controversial action was brokering a private-sector bailout in 1998 of Long-Term Capital Management, a large hedge fund which had amassed billions of dollars in debt and whose imminent bankruptcy threatened to spark a contagion of investor panic.

[1][10] In speeches he made during his tenure at the Fed, he criticized the ballooning compensation of corporate CEOs,[3][1][7] the excess risk being increasingly taken on Wall Street,[1] and the growing income inequality in the U.S.[7][12] In 2003, immediately after leaving the New York Fed, McDonough was appointed as the first chairman of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, a U.S. non-profit regulatory entity created by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 to oversee audits of public companies and broker-dealers.

[15] In January 2006, he was appointed vice chairman of Merrill Lynch and as a senior advisor to its CEO Stanley O'Neal.

[16][14] He was responsible for advising senior management in the company's business development efforts with governments and financial institutions.