![]() ![]() The fossil-fuel industry would have seemingly little say over who runs the Federal Reserve, but it has donated generously to the campaigns of all twelve Republican members of the Senate Banking Committee. Yet Democrats say America’s fossil-fuel industry sees Bloom Raskin as a threat and is distorting her record in order to block her confirmation. Earlier this week, a report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that intensifying heat waves, droughts, and floods will affect billions of people, as well as animals and plants, across huge swaths of the planet. Moreover, she’s personally expressed the view that the Fed should have resisted pressure from climate-polluting fossil-fuel companies who wanted pandemic-related bailouts, and instead encouraged a shift to renewable energy sources. So what, exactly, is the problem? In Stiglitz’s view, “It’s very simple: special interests.” In speeches and op-ed pieces, Bloom Raskin has described climate change as a potential threat to global economic security. In addition, she is a financial regulator who has become an expert in cyber security, which would be useful at a moment when potential Russian cyber attacks pose a threat. ![]() She also served as Deputy Treasury Secretary during the Obama Administration, from 2014 to 2017, which made her the highest-ranking woman in the department’s history at the time. A graduate of Harvard Law School and a professor of law at Duke University, she served a term on the Fed’s board of governors from 2010 to 2014, to which she was confirmed with unanimous bipartisan support. It is just amazingly irresponsible.”ĭemocrats say the situation is all the more confounding because Bloom Raskin is far from an unvetted or untested nominee. To leave this many vacancies is just mind boggling to the rest of the world. is the most important economy in the world. Stiglitz, a progressive professor at Columbia University who has advised Democratic presidents, stressed that “the Federal Reserve is the most important economic institution in the U.S., and the U.S. “It’s an enormous dereliction of duty,” Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, told me. “In the midst of an attack, the Russians attacking Ukraine… they’re saying we’re not going to confirm the chair of the Federal Reserve, the vice-chair of supervision, the vice-chair of the Fed, and the other two governors.” He added, “We can’t run the Senate this way.”Ī boycott to stop a vote is extraordinary under any circumstances, but experts said they were stunned, given the magnitude of the country’s current economic challenges. “We just want them to show up for work,” he said of his Republican colleagues. In his State of the Union address on Tuesday night, Biden demanded that the panel confirm his nominees to the Federal Reserve, which, he said, “plays a critical role in fighting inflation.” The Senate Banking Committee’s chairman, Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from Ohio, told me that he plans to bring Bloom Raskin’s nomination back up for a committee vote as soon as possible, but so far one hasn’t been scheduled. This left not just Bloom Raskin but all five of Biden’s top nominees for the Fed in limbo, including Powell. ![]() Instead, after the twelve Republicans on the committee failed to show up, the meeting adjourned, and the Senate soon after went into recess. Had they met to vote as scheduled, her nomination would likely have survived a party-line tie, which under the Senate’s current rules would have advanced it to the Senate floor for the full body’s consideration. The Republicans’ goal was to block a single nominee: Sarah Bloom Raskin, Biden’s pick for vice-chair for supervision. Its aim was to deprive the Senate committee, which is split evenly between Democrats and Republicans, of the quorum necessary for a vote on Biden’s nominees to take place. The G.O.P.’s parliamentary maneuver was an almost unheard of act of obstruction. Last month, instead of voting on the confirmation of President Biden’s slate of five nominees to run the world’s most powerful central bank, the Republican members of the Senate Banking Committee staged a boycott. There are multiple vacancies on the panel, and its chairman, Jerome Powell, is awaiting Senate confirmation to a second four-year term. As the American economy faces market turmoil fuelled by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the highest inflation rate in forty years, and continuing damage from the COVID-19 pandemic, the Federal Reserve System’s board of governors has become a ghost ship. ![]()
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