She was unanimously confirmed by the Senate to top economic positions twice before, serving a term as a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, from 2010 to 2014, and as Deputy Secretary of the Treasury during the Obama Administration. Given Democrats’ single-vote advantage in the Senate, Manchin’s opposition has all but killed the Bloom Raskin nomination, relegating her to having to find a Republican vote, which seemed especially unlikely after Susan Collins, of Maine, also signalled her opposition on Monday.īloom Raskin, who is a law professor at Duke University, is not a new or untested figure on the national economic stage. Every Republican member of the Senate Banking Committee has also taken money from fossil-fuel interests, cumulatively accepting more than eight million dollars during their political careers from the producers of the carbon emissions that are helping to cause climate change. But it dooms the most powerful central bank in the world to a state of willful blindness regarding the looming chaos that scientists predict climate change will unleash.īloom Raskin’s fate was sealed on Monday, when Joe Manchin, the Democratic senator from West Virginia, signalled that he would oppose her confirmation because she “failed to satisfactorily address my concerns about the critical importance of financing an all-of-the-above energy policy to meet our nation’s critical energy needs.” Manchin’s family fortune is largely derived from coal, and he has taken more money from fossil-fuel interests than any other senator during the current cycle. Her withdrawal will likely enable the Senate’s confirmation of the rest of Biden’s slate of nominees to the Fed, at a time of roaring inflation and mounting perils abroad. But her expressed hope of encouraging a potential transition to cleaner energy triggered a backlash from America’s powerful oil, gas, and coal industries. In commentary last September, Bloom Raskin suggested that regulators should “ask themselves how their existing instruments can be used to incentivize a rapid, orderly, and just transition away from high-emission and biodiversity-destroying investments.” She was merely echoing the position taken by top central bankers and economists all over the world. For weeks, Raskin noted, the Republicans on the Senate Banking Committee “held hostage” not only her nomination but those of Biden’s four other picks to run the Fed, including the reappointment of its chair, Jerome Powell. On Tuesday, in the face of what she described as “relentless attacks by special interests” who oppose her frank acknowledgment that climate change could pose a threat to economic stability, Sarah Bloom Raskin submitted a letter to President Joe Biden withdrawing as his nominee to become the vice-chair for supervision of the Federal Reserve Board.
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