Biden Will Nominate Three New Fed Officials

She has not said much publicly about her monetary policy philosophy, though she has spoken favorably about keeping the Fed independent from politics. Her published work examines a wide range of topics: her doctoral thesis focused on credit markets in tsarist and post-Soviet Russia, while some of the work she is most famous for looked into mortality and race, and segregation and lynching.

Dr. Cook is an academic focused on macroeconomics, but “she is not a traditional one — she has looked at what we get wrong, sometimes, in the economy,” Julia Coronado, founder of the research firm MacroPolicy Perspectives, said in an interview before the pick was announced. “She is somebody who can hold her own, I think, in that room.”

Mr. Jefferson has worked as a research economist at the Fed board, and studied at the University of Virginia and Vassar College. He has written about the economics of poverty, and his research has delved into whether monetary policy that stokes investment with low interest rates helps or hurts less-educated workers.

“My findings suggest that opportunities start to open up for them as the labor market gets tight,” he said in an interview with the Minneapolis Fed in 2018.

He has also spoken candidly about his experience as a minority in economics.

“In graduate school at the University of Virginia, I was the only African American in the program the entire time there,” he said in that 2018 interview, noting that that had followed him into his professional appointments. “It has been a long, lonely road professionally.”

And he said economics needed more diverse voices.

“We need to be sitting around the table,” he said. “I think it is crucially important for public policy that we hear voices that represent diversity.”

With the new slate of candidates, what is arguably the top policymaking body in global economics will become much more varied in both race and gender.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/13/business/economy/biden-federal-reserve-nominees.html