Biden makes final Fed board picks

President Biden is nominating his final picks to the Federal Reserve Board, including tapping Sarah Bloom Raskin to be the Federal Reserve’s vice chairwoman of supervision, several news outlets reported on Thursday.

The White House said that Biden will nominate the former Federal Reserve governor to be the Federal Reserve’s vice chairwoman of supervision, The Wall Street Journal reported. Philip Jefferson, a Davidson College professor and administrator, and Lisa Cook, a Michigan State University professor, will also be nominated to the Federal Reserve board.

The nominations are still subject to confirmation from the Senate.

Raskin, a professor at Duke University’s law school and a former deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of the Treasury, said during a 2009 speech that the 2008 financial downturn was “brought upon us through a combination of greed, weak regulation and weak enforcement,” according to the Journal.

In an opinion essay published in The New York Times in May 2020, Raskin, who is also the wife of Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), claimed that fossil fuel companies should not have been eligible for COVID-19 relief amid concerns over climate change.

“The Fed is ignoring clear warning signs about the economic repercussions of the impending climate crisis by taking action that will lead to increases in greenhouse gas emissions at a time when even in the short term, fossil fuels are a terrible investment,” Raskin wrote at the time.

During the Obama administration, Cook was a White House Council of Economic Advisers senior economist. Jefferson was previously a Federal Reserve board staff economist in the 1990s for a year and taught economics at Swarthmore College between 1997 and 2019, according to the Journal.

The nominations of all three, if confirmed by the Senate, would add more women and people of color — Jefferson and Cook are both Black — to the Federal Reserve Board, which has only had three Black members, all of whom were men, in its entire history, the Journal noted.

The Hill has reached out to the White House for comment.

Updated at 9:39.