The Federal Reserve goes woke! Just when we need sound monetary policy to combat inflation and preserve economic growth, President Biden is seeking to turn this incredibly important institution into a liberal center of woke sentiment. Nothing could be more dangerous!
Biden’s nominees for Federal Reserve Governor positions are Sarah Bloom Raskin, Phillip Jefferson, and Lisa Cook. Raskin, the nominee for Vice Chair of Supervision, advocated last year that the Fed should use its important stress tests to penalize banks that serve fossil fuel companies. She wants to drive financial resources away from oil and natural gas firms towards “sustainable investments”. The Fed has no business being involved in climate change.
Phillip Jefferson said in 2018 that the Fed hasn’t, “paid as much attention to the disparate effects of monetary policy against different demographic groups”. The Fed’s mandate is specifically price stability and the overall level of unemployment, not social demographic engineering.
The third nominee, Lisa Cook—although an accomplished Michigan State University economics professor— has dedicated much of her scholarship on the wider economic effects of racism and sexism. Conservative columnist George Will has said Cook’s nomination would be a “travesty” and Senator Pat Toomey, a retiring moderate Republican from Pennsylvania, emphasized during Cook’s Congressional hearing that she privately refused to endorse the stated policy of Fed Chairman Jerome Powell to raise interest rates and slow inflationary pressures.
Since the 1980s when Fed Chairman Paul Volker bravely wrung inflation out of the economy, the Federal Reserve has remained staunchly committed to stable prices. If the Fed is allowed to be overrun by this liberal wokeness with a fixation on climate change, demographic groups, and social policy, we’re in big trouble.