Free Republic

A seat on the U.S Federal Reserve Board, carries tremendous power. The seven members of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System are nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate. A full term is fourteen years. During that time, a board member can influence the financial policies of the world's most powerful economy. In some ways the seven men and women, have more power than Congress or even the President himself. That's why appointments to the Federal Reserve Board deserve as much scrutiny as those to the Supreme Court. President Barack Obama recently made three nominations...

Obama considers Republican for one of two seats on FedBy Neil Irwin, Published: August 12 President Obama is considering nominating two economists with backgrounds in finance — one of them a Republican — as Federal Reserve governors, according to a source familiar with the decision making. The White House is looking at Jeremy Stein, a Harvard economist, and Richard Clarida, of Columbia University and the bond investment firm Pimco, to fill two vacant slots on the seven-member Fed Board of Governors. Clarida served in George W. Bush’s Treasury Department as an assistant secretary. Stein did a brief stint at Treasury...

Don't even think about it, Ben. That's the message Capitol Hill is sending the Federal Reserve chairman regarding a possible third round of quantitative easing after Peter Diamond withdrew his nomination to join the Fed Board of Governors today. The Nobel prize winner -- Bernanke was once a student of his -- certainly had the credentials. But the Senate had sat on his nomination for 14 months. Republicans objected to his support of the Wall Street bailouts and the Fed-s aggressive monetary policy, including its current "QE2" $600 billion Treasury buying program... There's some speculation that the Fed could adopt...

One of President Obama's stalled nominees to join the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors won a share of the Nobel Prize in economics on Monday. Peter Diamond, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), received the award along with Dale Mortensen of Northwestern University and Christopher Pissarides of the London School of Economics "for their analysis of markets with search frictions," according to the Nobel committee's citation. Obama announced his intention to nominate Diamond as a governor of the Federal Reserve Board in late April. The Senate Banking Committee approved his nomination, along with several other nominees, in...