Bloomberg News/Landov
Richard Clarida, an expert on monetary policy and long-time economics professor at Columbia University, was confirmed by the Senate Tuesday to be the Federal Reserve’s vice chairman.
The vote was 69 to 26.
At his confirmation hearing this spring, Clarida, a Trump administration nominee, took a hard line against White House pressure.
Asked by Sen. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from Ohio, if the Fed had to be independent from White House pressure, Clarida replied: “Absolutely it is essential.”
“I had a number of meetings over several months with a number of officials including the president and in no meeting or at no time did I ever have any reason to question the independence of the Federal Reserve,” Clarida told Brown at the hearing in May.
But two months later, Trump began to sharply criticize Fed policy, arguing that the rate hikes are unnecessary and damage the economy.
Clarida, 61, has some Washington experience, working at the Treasury Department under President George W. Bush. He has also been a managing director of Pacific Investment Management Co., known as Pimco, since 2006.
His academic work has been influential in central banking circles, said Vivek Dehejia, a professor of economics at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada.
Clarida was one of a small group of economists who urged the Fed to adopt an inflation target. The Fed finally set a 2% inflation target in 2012 under the leadership of former chairman Ben Bernanke.
The Senate confirmed Clarida for a four-year term as Fed vice chairman, serving under Chairman Jerome Powell. The Senate then acted in a separate vote to confirm him to the Fed board for a term that ends in January 2022.
For all his public grousing about the Fed, Trump will ultimately be able to nominate six of the seven members of the Fed’s board of governors.
There remain three vacancies on the seven-member Fed board in Washington that Trump can fill. He has nominated Michelle Bowman, a former Kansas banker and state banking regulator, and Marvin Goodfriend, an economics professor at Carnegie Mellon University, for two of those vacancies and they are awaiting Senate action. Goodfriend may not have enough Republican votes to get confirmed.
In addition to the seven-member board of governors, there are also 12 presidents of the regional Fed banks who help set interest-rate policy. These presidents are appointed by the bank’s own board of directors.
Source : MTV
