Lael Brainard a leading candidate for the Fed

President Obama is reportedly poised to nominate Ms. Brainard, currently of the Treasury Department, to join the board of governors at the US Federal Reserve.

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Lael Brainard / Wikipedia

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Anticipation is rife around at Washington that Lael Brainard is about to be offered and will accept the, will accept the White House nomination for one of the seats currently available on the board of governors at the Federal Reserve, that have been made available following the resignation of two members of the board, coincidentally both of them female . Ironically one of them is Sarah Bloom Raskin, who left the board take up a position with the US Treasury and the other, Elizabeth Duke, who announced that she had decided to resign from the board.

Lael Brainard is currently Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs in the administration of President Barack Obama, with her post confirmed by the United States Senate in April 2010. On taking up the post Ms. Brainard became the highest-ranking female Treasury official in American history.

During her time at the treasury Ms. Brainard has earned considerable appreciation for her part in helping to stabilize the US economy and help it move into the recovery mode, recovery from the financial crisis and strengthen global growth.

Ms. Brainard is no stranger to the White House having been part of the administration team during Bill Clinton’s presidency.

Final decisions on who will be joining the board might well be released as early as next week, with the Fed scheduled to get together on the 17^th and 18^th of September for their next policymaking session, which many in Washington predict will be one of the last to be presided over by the current chairman of the US Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke who is expected to leave his post when his second seven year term comes to an end at the end of January of 2014.

President Obama is expected to release some details of who will be nominated as Bernanke’s successor within the coming months, with the two leading candidates being the current Fed Vice Chairperson Janet Yellen and Larry Summers, the former Treasury secretary who is regarded as being among the leading economic policy advisers for the Democrat party.

Lael Brainard spent her childhood as an expatriate American citizen, first in Communist Poland and Germany, returning only to the United States to begin her University studies. Ms Brainard graduated with both masters and doctoral degrees in economics from Harvard University, where she studied as a National Science Foundation Fellow, later going on to graduate with an honors degree from the College of Social Studies at Wesleyan University.

During President Bill Clinton’s administration Lael Brainard served as Deputy National Economic Adviser and Chair of the Deputy Secretaries Committee on International Economics , leaving to become a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution from 2001 to 2009, going on to serve as vice president and director of the Global Economy and Development program during the years 2006 to 2009.

Within two months of taking up the role of President, Barack Obama nominated Lael Brainard for the role of Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs, although it could more than a year for her to take up the post.

Since her appointment Ms. Brainard has served as the principal policy advisor to U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner on international economic matters at the Treasury Department until he left his appointment in January of this year.

Lael Brainard has been the recipient of a White House Fellowship and a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellowship, a Marshall Scholar elect, and is currently a member of the Wesleyan University Board of Trustees, the Council on Foreign Relations as well as the Aspen Strategy Group.

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