MANCHIN ANNOUNCES OPPOSITION TO FEDERAL RESERVE NOMINEE SARAH BLOOM RASKIN:
Sarah Bloom Raskin’s nomination to the Federal Reserve Board appeared all but doomed on Monday after Sen. Joe Manchin III, a key Democratic vote, said he opposed her because of her stance on energy in an era of inflation.
“I have carefully reviewed Sarah Bloom Raskin’s qualifications and previous public statements,” Manchin, or West Virginia, said in a statement Monday. “Her previous public statements have 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. I have come to the conclusion that I am unable to support her nomination to serve as a member of the Federal Reserve Board.”
Raskin’s nomination to the job of vice chair for supervision — the Fed’s top banking regulator — was already under pressure, with Republicans initially opposing her candidacy over her focus on climate change and its threat to financial stability.
Can’t say I blame him. As the Wall Street Journal noted in January: Biden Plays Capture the Federal Reserve. Sarah Bloom Raskin wants to politicize Fed bank supervision, especially on climate.
In May 2020, with awful timing, she wrote a New York Times op-ed titled “Why Is the Fed Spending So Much Money on a Dying Industry?” That was amid the government’s pandemic shutdowns, when the Fed was acting to save the economy from collapse. The Fed established broad-based lending programs to prevent businesses that were otherwise sound from failing due to the shutdowns.
Ms. Raskin wanted the Fed to exclude fossil-fuel companies from these facilities. “The Fed is ignoring clear warning signs about the economic repercussions of the impending climate crisis by taking action that will lead to increases in greenhouse gas emissions at a time when even in the short term, fossil fuels are a terrible investment,” she wrote.
This showed colossally bad judgment. The crisis of the hour was Covid and a potential depression, not climate. Yet at that perilous moment Ms. Raskin was urging the Fed to discriminate against an industry that employed hundreds of thousands of people. Had the Fed taken her advice, many more oil and gas producers would have gone bankrupt, and energy prices would be even higher today.
As Glenn wrote in December in the New York Post: The ‘cabal’ that bragged of foisting Joe Biden on us must answer for his failed presidency.
And his radical fellow travelers.
(Updated and bumped.)