President Joe Biden’s second nomination for the Federal Reserve’s vice chairman of banking supervision, Michael Barr, has faced some questions from the opposition, Reuters wrote Thursday (May 19).
That said, Reuters reported that there was likely not a “concerted effort” to sink his candidacy. Barr is currently a law professor at the University of Michigan, and he has support from moderate Democrats.
While progressives were not sold on him at first, he’s recently gained more support from them because of how long the top Fed post has been vacant now.
Barr served as a senior Treasury Department official under former President Barack Obama, but at his Senate testimony on Thursday, he got some “skeptical questions” from Republican lawmakers.
He struck a moderate tone on various issues like financial risk from climate change and the proper regulation of cryptocurrencies, and he vowed to take a “holistic view” on the state of bank regulation.
The Republicans noted a few times that he had opposed a 2018 bank deregulation measure, of which he said he had concerns with some parts of the law. However, he said he did support a primary tenet of it, which was to make a tiered regulatory environment for banks with stricter rules for bigger firms.
PYMNTS wrote about Barr’s candidacy before, writing that he was the leading contender for the position. The job of policing the nation’s banks at the Fed is an important one, watching over big banks like J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup.
Read more: Ex-Treasury Official Michael Barr is Frontrunner to Police Banks at Fed
This comes after the first nominee, Sarah Bloom Raskin, ended up withdrawing her consideration earlier this year.
That development came after West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin, a key vote in the chamber due to the even split, said he couldn’t support her because of her stance on climate change.
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