Sarah Bloom Raskin is, it seems, unhappy that climate policy might be taken away from the unelected.
The Financial Times reports:
When Joe Biden’s White House announced last year that it wanted Sarah Bloom Raskin to become the Federal Reserve governor in charge of financial stability, she seemed a shoo-in: Raskin has previously served as deputy Treasury secretary and a Fed governor — and on both occasions Congress confirmed her with strong bipartisan support.
Not this time. Raskin, a Duke University law professor married to a Democratic congressman, is an expert on green legislation (among other things) and keen to incorporate climate change analysis into central banking policy and financial regulation. This horrifies some Republicans, it seems.
The tone in which the latter of those two paragraphs is written is revealing, but, coming from the FT, a paper that, it sometimes seems, rarely encounters a technocratic project that it doesn’t like, it’s not exactly surprising. These days the FT has embraced a kind of Davos-friendly climate fundamentalism, both within its pages and, via conferences and so on, as a business opportunity.
But should the idea of climate-change “analysis” entering into central-banking policy “horrify” Republicans? Yes.
As, for example, economist John Cochrane (repeatedly) and HSBC dissident Stuart Kirk have argued, the idea that climate change itself (the interventions of climate policy-makers is a different matter) will pose any material systemic financial risk is, to put it bluntly, absurd. The Fed should concentrate on its existing mandate, rather than try to extend it to a place where it has no business going. If Congress wishes to expand the Fed’s remit to enable the central bank to recast itself as a climate warrior, that would be a mistake, but it is Congress’s mistake to make, not something that the Fed has any right to do on its own behalf. The FT might not like that, but democracy is what it is.
The same goes for financial “climate” regulation of the type now being proposed by the SEC under its progressive chairman, Gary Gensler. The agency’s current proposals are an attempt to impose climate legislation without the bother of a legislature. Under the circumstances, Republicans, again, are right to be horrified. There’s also the small matter that Gensler’s proposals, through the damage they will inflict on investors, represent the opposite of what the agency is meant to be doing, but that, I suppose, is a topic for another time.
The FT:
So how does Raskin view the current state of green policymaking? Last week she spoke to me at the Aspen Ideas Festival — along with Michael Sheren, green policy adviser at the Bank of England — in her first general public appearance since her candidacy was blocked.
The fact that Bank of England has “a green policy adviser” will doubtless come as a relief to Brits, hard pressed at a time when their country’s inflation rate is running at 9.1 percent.
The FT:
Their message was sobering: Raskin says that the current backlash against green policies is not just dangerous, but occurring on a scale that is shocking even longtime Washington insiders. One sign of this can be seen in the Supreme Court’s decision on Friday to curtail the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to impose greenhouse gas emissions controls on the power plant sector. This makes it hard for America to meet its targets for reducing emissions, Raskin says, since the power plant sector is the second-biggest source of greenhouse gases. It may also prevent other agencies, such as the SEC, from introducing their own green reforms.
Good. The impetus of such “reforms” (if not, of course, their small print) should come from democratically elected legislators, not regulators off on a crusade.
More nonsense then follows, but not to worry. The FT reports that, in Sheren’s view, the result of this backlash means that “the onus will be on private sector companies, such as the big American asset managers, to push forward the green agenda — without government mandates.”
Leave it to the oligarchs!
Corporatism, too, is what it is.