President Joe Biden will nominate three people for the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors, including former Fed official Sarah Bloom Raskin for the top regulatory slot, and Lisa Cook, who would be the first Black woman to serve as a governor.
Biden is also nominating Phillip Jefferson, an economist, dean of faculty at Davidson College in North Carolina and a former Fed researcher, according to a person familiar with the decision Thursday who was not authorized to speak on the record. The three nominations will have to be approved by the Senate
Raskin's nomination will be welcomed by progressive senators and advocacy groups, who see her as a tougher bank regulator than Chair Jerome Powell She is also viewed as someone committed to incorporating climate change considerations into the Fed's oversight of banks. For that reason, however, she has already drawn opposition from Republican senators.
In a May 2020 column in The New York Times, Raskin criticized the Fed’s willingness to support lending to oil and gas companies as part of its efforts to bolster the financial sector in the depths of the pandemic recession.
Cook, with Jefferson, would be the fourth and fifth Black members of the Fed's Board of Governors in its 108-year history. She has been an economics and international relations professor at Michigan State since 2005. She also was also a staff economist on the White House Council of Economic Advisers from 2011 to 2012 and was an adviser to the Biden-Harris transition team on the Fed and bank regulatory policy.
