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Senate Banking Republicans kept returning to Raskin’s earlier speeches and writing, including a New York Times op-ed in which she criticized the Fed for making changes to its emergency pandemic lending programs that she said would benefit struggling oil and gas firms.
Pressed to explain her view, Raskin said it is “inappropriate for the Fed to make credit decisions and allocations based on choosing winners and losers.” And she said her op-ed was about decisions the Fed had made about emergency lending programs, not as part of the supervisory process.
Republicans were not satisfied and accused Raskin of reversing herself on long-standing positions.
“This is one of the most remarkable cases of confirmation conversion I have ever seen,” Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), the top Republican on the Banking Committee, said.
Toomey said the Fed’s plans to assess banks’ exposure to climate risks will inevitably lead to new restrictions, such as increased capital requirements or limits on their exposure to fossil fuel industries.
“The idea will be to allocate capital away from the heavily carbon-emitting parts of our economy,” he said. “How do I know that? Because Ms. Raskin has told us this repeatedly.”
McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, blasted Raskin on the Senate floor Thursday, saying she would go beyond the Fed’s limited dual mandate to “pursue liberal environmental goals.”
“President Biden’s nominee for Fed Vice Chair wants unelected bureaucrats to financially bully the private sector into policy changes which lack enough support to become law the honest way,” McConnell said.
Raskin has said that financial institutions should account for the risks posed by climate change. Aggressive greenhouse gas emissions policies that make fossil fuels more expensive could devalue the assets held by banks, harming investments in firms whose business models rely on carbon-intensive goods and services, Raskin and other climate experts have said.
“Whatever the risk, the job of the banking regulators is to make sure that the banking system has appropriately accounted for these risks and is just prepared to mitigate them,” she said Thursday. “Now, the watchword here is resiliency, resiliency in the face of potential risks.”
Though some Democrats have criticized Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell for failing to do more on climate change, they argued Thursday that Raskin’s views are no different than his.
“There’s been a lot of hyperventilating about today’s nominees that is based on hyperbole and misrepresentation rather than their records and actual experience,” Senate Banking Chair Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) said.
“As a governor, she never advocated for the Fed to allocate private capital,” he added. “If that’s not evidence and proof, what could be?”
