Washington US January 15, ANI Lisa Cook became the first black woman in American history to serve the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors.
President Joe Biden nominated three people for the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors on Friday, 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, according to ABC News.
Cook has been a professor of economics and international relations at Michigan State since 2005. She was an economist on the White House Council of Economic Advisers from 2011 to 2012 and was an adviser to the Biden-Harris transition team on Fed and bank regulatory policy.
Cook is best known for her research on the impact of racial violence on African-American invention and innovation. The three nominees who will have to be confirmed by the Senate would fill up the seven-member board.
The central bank will have to raise its benchmark interest rate to try to curb high inflation, without compromising the recovery from the Pandemic recession.
Biden's picks would increase the diversity of the Fed. Cook and Jefferson would be the fourth and fifth Black governors in the Fed's 108 year history. According to ABC News, the majority of the board would consist of female appointees for the first time.
Biden said on Friday that 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.
Raskin, 60, a Harvard-trained lawyer, previously served on the Fed's seven-member board from 2010 to 2014, and was a Harvard-trained lawyer. Raskin is married to Rep. Jamie Raskin, a liberal Maryland Democrat who gained widespread visibility as a member of the House Judiciary Committee when he brought indictment 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.
According to an interview with the American Economic Association, Jefferson, who grew up in a working-class family in Washington, has focused his research on poverty and monetary policy.