WASHINGTON Reuters -- President Joe Biden said last month that he would renominate U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, but he left Washington guessing who would become the Fed's new regulatory chief.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday that the White House was considering Sarah Bloom Raskin, a former Fed governor and former Treasury Department official.
In October, the Republican appointee Randal Quarles stepped down from that role and is due to leave the central bank by the end of the year. Biden said that and other Fed picks would be announced in early December.
Analysts and Washington insiders had seen fellow Fed governor Lael Brainard as the leading candidate to replace Quarles because she opposed his agenda to revisit rules created after the 2007 -- 2009 global financial crisis. She stepped into the Fed Vice Chair role, which focuses on economic and monetary policy.
Progressives are pushing for a candidate who would take a tougher stance on Wall Street, although it is not known if they will get their way. According to several analysts and Washington insiders, there are the leading names in the mix.
A former Fed governor and Treasury official, Raskin is supported by progressives but could also get enough Senate votes to secure the position, said Jaret Seiberg, an analyst at Cowen Washington Research Group.
As a Fed governor from 2010 to 2014, Raskin slammed proprietary trading as low or no real economic value and pushed for a strict interpretation of the Volcker Rule, a major post-crisis reform curbing such speculative investments.
Former President Barack Obama later tapped Raskin to serve as a deputy Treasury secretary. She spent time as the top financial regulator for Maryland before joining the Fed.
Raskin recently took a new role at Duke Law, where she has taught since 2017. She will be a faculty director at the Global Financial Markets Center next year. Raskin didn't respond to requests for comment.
From 2012 to 2017 Cordray was a former Ohio attorney general. He was the first director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau CFPB. Under his leadership, the agency took an aggressive stance against abusive mortgage and payday lenders, earning praise from progressives and critics from Republicans who said he was overstepping the agency's statutory remit.
After leaving the agency, Cordray ran unsuccessfully for the governor of Ohio. Cordray didn't respond to requests for comment.
Liang was a former Fed official and Treasury under secretary for domestic finance. He was instrumental in building the post-crisis regulatory framework. She spent decades at the Fed as a staffer, becoming the first director of the Division of Financial Stability after the financial crisis.
She left the central bank in 2017 to join the think tank Brookings Institution, where she criticized Republican efforts to trim capital and liquidity requirements for large banks.
Liang had previously been nominated for a Fed board seat by former President Donald Trump but withdrew in 2019 after Republicans blocked her nomination because she worried she would be too tough on Wall Street.
We would expect her to tighten big bank oversight, but she also strikes us as pragmatic, which may not work for progressives, according to Cowen Washington Research Group's Seiberg.
Bostic became the first black person to hold a regional Fed president position after his appointment as President of the Atlanta Fed in 2017. He has been outspoken on racial diversity and economic inequality issues, both of which are key policy priorities for the Biden administration.
Bostic was an economist by training and previously held positions at the Fed in Washington, where he won praise for his work on community lending rules and the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Brian Gardner, chief Washington policy strategist at Stifel Financial Corp., said Bostic represents a bit of an unknown regarding financial regulation.
In an interview on Bloomberg Television on Monday, Bostic said he had no trips to Washington on his calendar and that any decision on such an appointment was out of his hands.
Hsu was previously the head of big bank supervision at the Fed. As acting Comptroller, he has pushed Democratic priorities, including climate change risk, and warned banks against over-confidence coming out of the epidemic.
While he would be a good fit for Fed supervision, Washington insiders said that the nominee to replace him as the permanent Comptroller, Saule Omarova, may not get enough Senate votes after some moderate Democrats expressed concerns about her academic work. The White House may need Hsu to stick around.
Baradaran, an academic and expert on financial inclusion, is loved by progressives who pushed her for a job as Comptroller. The White House passed her over because of concerns among the industry and moderate lawmakers, some of whom said she did not have enough experience in government.
A spokeswoman for Hsu didn't immediately respond to a request for comment, and Baradaran didn't respond immediately to a request for comment.