Herbert Cole "Nugget" Coombs (24 February 1906 – 29 October 1997) was an Australian economist and public servant. He was the first Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia, in which capacity he served from 1960 to 1968. He is noted for his contributions to the arts, environment, and Indigenous justice movement.

Herbert Cole "Nugget" Coombs was born on 24 February 1906 in Kalamunda, Western Australia, one of six children of a country railway stationmaster and a well-read mother.^{[citation needed]}

Coombs's political and economic views were formed by the Great Depression, which hit Australia in 1929 and caused a complete economic collapse in a country totally dependent on commodity exports for its prosperity. As a student in Perth, he was a socialist, but while he was studying at the London School of Economics, he became converted to the economic views of John Maynard Keynes. He spent the rest of his career pursuing Keynesian solutions to Australia's economic problems. He never sought public office nor joined a political party, but he sought to exercise political influence as an administrator and advisor.

He won a scholarship to Perth Modern School. After five years there, he worked as a pupil-teacher for a year before spending two years at the Teachers' College. He then spent two years teaching at country schools, during which he studied for a Bachelor of Arts degree in the University of Western Australia (UWA), then the only free university in Australia. Transferring to a metropolitan school for the final two years, he graduated B.A. with first-class honours in economics and won a Hackett Studentship for overseas study. That was deferred for a year, enabling him to graduate M.A., also from UWA, and to marry fellow teacher Mary Alice ('Lallie') Ross at the end of 1931. As a student at UWA, Coombs was elected as the 1930 Sports Council president and subsequently the 1931 president of the Guild of Undergraduates. He then proceeded to the London School of Economics, where he studied under Harold Laski, one of the most influential Marxists of the 20th century. In 1933, he was awarded a PhD for a thesis on central banking.

In 1934, he returned to a teaching position in Perth and combined it with part-time lecturing in economics at UWA.

In 1935, he became an economist at the Commonwealth Bank, then a state-owned bank that served as Australia's central bank. In 1939, he shifted to the Department of the Treasury in Canberra as a senior economist. He became known as a Keynesian rebel against the classical economics theory that had dominated the Treasury, under the influence of the Melbourne University school of economists, led by L. F. Giblin and Douglas Copland.

The Australian Labor Party under John Curtin came to power in 1941, and Coombs found himself in a political environment much more supportive of his views. Curtin appointed him to the Commonwealth Bank board in October 1941. In 1942, the Treasurer, Ben Chifley, appointed him Director of Rationing, and in 1943 made him Director-General of the Department of Post-war Reconstruction, a new ministry that Chifley held in addition to the Treasury. Coombs played a leading role in the preparation of the White Paper on Full Employment in Australia which, for the first time, committed the government to maintaining full employment from the post-WWII years.

Chifley, a former train driver, had no training in economics and came to rely heavily on Coombs's advice. Coombs's closeness to Chifley and the greatly expanded role of government in the economy during World War II made him one of the most powerful public servants in Australian history. His influence further expanded when Chifley became prime minister in 1945.