Senate Committee Set to Vote on Biden’s Fed Nominees

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The Senate Banking Committee is scheduled to vote Tuesday on President Joe Biden’s five nominees for the Federal Reserve System’s board of governors, including Chairman Jerome Powell for a second four-year term and Lael Brainard to be vice chairman of the board of governors.

Sarah Bloom Raskin, a lawyer married to Rep. Jamie Raskin (D., Md.), was nominated as vice chairman for supervision of the Fed’s Board of Governors, the top bank regulator role. Economists Lisa Cook and Phillip Jefferson have been nominated to serve on the Fed’s Board of Governors.

Raskin, a former deputy secretary at the Treasury Department and former Fed governor, is a law professor at Duke University. Republicans have expressed concerns about her previous positions calling for U.S. financial regulators to help address climate change.

Cook, a professor of economics and international relations at Michigan State University, has written about racial inequality and how hate-related violence has hurt economic growth. Jefferson, vice president for academic affairs and an economics professor at Davidson College, was previously an economist at the Fed’s board. 

Two Democrats on the committee, Jon Tester of Montana and Mark Warner of Virginia, told Reuters they would vote to confirm the whole slate of nominees. Most of the nominees are seen likely to succeed, though Raskin’s confirmation may require the support of every Senate Democrat, the report said.

The committee will also vote on Sandra Thompson of Maryland, nominated as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency. In a separate meeting, it will hear from Nellie Liang, the Treasury Department’s under secretary for domestic finance, about the president’s working group on financial markets report on stablecoins, according to Punchbowl News.

If approved by the committee, the nominees still face a vote in the wider Senate. The hearing is not open to the public but will be livestreamed at banking.senate.gov starting at 2:15 p.m. Eastern Time.

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