Twice, Lael Brainard, 61, missed one of the positions she could dream of. At the end of 2020, when Democrat Joe Biden was elected President of the United States, the economist was cited to become Secretary of the Treasury, but Mr. Biden preferred Janet Yellen, former President of the Fed, the American central bank.
A few months later, Mr.me Brainard was in the running to become chair of the Fed, but Joe Biden chose to renew Jerome Powell, a moderate Republican appointed to head the institution by the previous American president, Donald Trump. Mme Brainard, who had been a member of the Fed’s board of governors since 2014, had to settle for the vice-chairmanship.
Finally, this doctor in economics from Harvard switches to the White House, where she was appointed president of the National Economic Council, a forum which “coordinates and implements the President’s economic policy objectives”. Among his illustrious predecessors, Robert Rubin and Laura Tyson under Bill Clinton (1993-2001), Larry Summers under Barack Obama (2009-2017) or Gary Cohn under Donald Trump.
Positioned at the heart of power, perhaps she will be able to run for the secretary of the Treasury, or the presidency of the Fed, if Joe Biden is elected for a second term in 2024. Until then, Mme Brainard will accompany the second half of the president’s mandate and his probable electoral campaign for his re-election. In a particular context: most spending was voted on during the first part of the mandate, and the Democrats lost the majority in the House of Representatives, sovereign in budgetary matters. Mme Brainard is therefore going to have to implement the Biden plans and negotiate with the Republicans.
Extremely rich course
In a statement, Mr. Biden believes that Mr.me Brainard, “one of the country’s leading macro-economists, brings an extraordinary depth of national and international economic expertise…and understands how the economy affects ordinary people”. Indeed, this daughter of a diplomat born in Hamburg, having spent her childhood in Germany and Poland, has an extremely rich career.
After her studies at Harvard and six years of teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, this Democrat joined the Clinton administration in 1997 as the President’s economic adviser for international affairs, as the entry of China in the WTO. She returned to politics under Barack Obama, appointed Treasury Undersecretary for International Affairs, before leaving in 2014 at the Fed. A globalized, regulatory democrat, even if that was not enough for the taste of the left wing of the party.
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