Lisa Cook became the first black woman in American history to serve the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors.
President Joe Biden on Friday (local time) nominated 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; Lisa Cook, who would be the first Black woman to serve on the board and Phillip Jefferson, an economist, dean of faculty at Davidson College in North Carolina and a former Fed researcher, reported ABC News.
Cook has been a professor of economics and international relations at Michigan State since 2005. She 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.
Cook is best known for her research on the impact of racial violence on African-American invention and innovation. Cook has also been an advocate for Black women in economics, a profession that is notably less diverse than other social sciences, reported ABC News.
The three nominees, who will have to be confirmed by the Senate, would fill out the Fed's seven-member 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, reported ABC News.
"This group will bring much-needed expertise, judgement 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.
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, reported ABC News.
A Harvard-trained lawyer, Raskin, 60, previously served on the Fed's seven-member board from 2010 to 2014. 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.
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.
Jefferson, who grew up in a working-class family in Washington, according to an interview with the American Economic Association, has focused his research on poverty and monetary policy.
In a 2005 paper, he concluded that the benefits of a hot economy from the reduction in unemployment among lower-skilled workers outweighed the costs, including the risk that companies would adopt automation once labour grew scarce, reported ABC News.
( With inputs from ANI )
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