Biden chooses 3 for Federal Reserve
WASHINGTON — President Biden on Friday announced the nominations of three people for the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, including Sarah Bloom Raskin, a former Fed and Treasury official, for the top regulatory slot and Lisa Cook, who would be the first Black woman to serve on the Fed’s board.
Biden also nominated Philip Jefferson, an economist, dean of faculty at Davidson College in North Carolina and a former Fed researcher. The three nominees, who will have to be confirmed by the Senate, would fill out the Fed’s sevenmember board.
They would join the Fed at a particularly challenging time in which the central bank will undertake the delicate task of raising its benchmark interest rate to try to curb high inflation, without undercutting the recovery from the pandemic recession.
If approved, Biden’s picks would significantly increase the Fed’s diversity. Cook and Jefferson would be just the fourth and fifth Black governors in the Fed’s 108-year history. And for the first time, a majority of the board would consist of female appointees.
In late November, Biden also nominated Jerome Powell for a second four-year term as Fed chair and chose Lael Brainard, a Fed board member, to be the vice chair.
“This group will bring much needed expertise, judgment and leadership to the Federal Reserve while at the same time bringing a diversity of thought and perspective never seen before on the Board of Governors,” Biden said in a statement Friday.
Raskin’s nomination to the position of Fed vice chair for supervision — the nation’s top bank regulator — will be welcomed by progressive senators and advocacy groups, who see her as likely to take a tougher approach to bank regulation than Randal Quarles, a Trump appointee who stepped down last month. She is also viewed as someone committed to incorporating climate change considerations into the Fed’s oversight of banks. For that reason, though, she has already drawn opposition from some Republican senators.
A Harvard-trained lawyer, Raskin, 60, previously served on the Fed’s seven-member board from 2010 to 2014. President Barack Obama then chose her to serve as deputy Treasury secretary, the No. 2 job in the department.
As Fed governors, Raskin, Cook, and Jefferson would vote on interest-rate policy decisions at the eight meetings each year of the Fed’s policymaking committee, which also includes the 12 regional Fed bank presidents.
Raskin’s first term as a
Fed governor followed her work as Maryland’s commissioner of financial regulation, when she oversaw the state’s banks during the 2008 financial crisis.
Raskin is married to Rep. Jamie Raskin, a liberal Maryland Democrat who gained widespread visibility as a member of the House Judiciary Committee when it brought impeachment charges against President Donald Trump.