By Moira Warburton and Ann Saphir
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President Joe Biden’s three Federal Reserve Board nominees, including his pick for the influential Fed vice chair post, won approval on Wednesday from the Senate Banking Committee allowing their nominations to advance to consideration by the full Senate.
Lawmakers led by the panel’s chair, Democrat Sherrod Brown, voted unanimously in support of elevating Philip Jefferson, a former economics professor appointed to the Fed just last year, to the central bank’s No. 2 position.
The vote was 13 to 10 approving the nominations of World Bank economist Adriana Kugler to fill the only vacancy on the seven-seat Fed Board, and approving Fed Governor Lisa Cook to a new term in that role.
Fed policymakers are locked in a battle with high inflation, and since last March have raised the key U.S. policy rate a full five percentage points to slow lending and investment so as to cool economic growth and persistently high post-pandemic price pressures.
A government report out earlier Wednesday offered fresh evidence the Fed’s efforts are having the intended effect, with consumer prices rising just 3% last month from a year earlier.
All three nominees in a hearing last month pledged to take their cues from economic data as they do their utmost to bring down inflation without too much of an increase in the U.S. unemployment rate, now at a low 3.6%.
The nominations add a measure of diversity to the Fed Board whose members, along with the presidents of the 12 regional Fed banks, set borrowing costs for the world’s biggest economy. Kugler would be the first-ever Latina to serve on the Fed in its more than 100-year history. Cook and Jefferson are Black.
(Reporting by Moira Warburton and Ann Saphir; Editing by Andrea Ricci)
