President Joe Biden has nominated three smart, diverse candidates to fill vacancies on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. Predictably, Republicans are already complaining about their views, particularly those of Sarah Bloom Raskin, the nominee for vice-chair of supervision, who has expressed concern about the effects of climate change on financial stability and has an interest in the risks posed by shadow banking, cryptocurrencies and cyber security. Conservatives say her appointment would “politicise bank supervision”.
The arguments are cynical and flawed. For starters, the notion of “politicising” the Fed ignores the fact that it has for several decades now been increasingly political, in the sense that central bankers have, by choice and by force, become the chief economic actors in the country.
From Alan Greenspan onwards, the Fed has successfully used low interest rates to bolster asset prices and stretch out the business cycle. Average recovery cycles have been expanding since 1982. This has made it convenient for politicians of both parties not to take hard decisions that involve trade-offs between interest groups. Instead, they kick the responsibility for keeping an economy increasingly driven by asset price inflation, rather than by productivity and wage growth, over to the Fed.