Biden’s Treasury pick could be key to tackling climate change

Biden’s Treasury pick will have to cope with a recession and also help address inequality and climate change.

Incoming United States Treasury secretaries have been confronted over the past two decades with the financial rescue of other countries, the bailout of the US banking system and a trade war.

But whoever Joe Biden chooses may face an agenda of historic depth and breadth, fighting crises while pursuing the lofty goals the president-elect set during his campaign. Biden’s Treasury pick will have to cope with a recession and joblessness, as well as serving as the fulcrum to address wealth inequality, climate change and other issues.

Names floated so far have spoken or written across those issues, and have extensive experience either at Treasury or the Federal Reserve, or both. Perhaps as significantly, each has pushed institutional boundaries during their careers.

The candidates include former Fed chair Janet Yellen, who deepened the Fed’s focus on workers and inequality, and has remained active in policy debates at the Brookings Institution think tank after President Donald Trump replaced her as head of the central bank after a wide-ranging career.

Sarah Bloom Raskin served as a Fed governor and deputy treasury secretary, the only woman so far to hold that second-in-command role at the agency. A lawyer and former state financial regulator in Maryland, she has worked in finance, and currently serves a director with Vanguard, the investment giant with $6 trillion in assets under management. She helped craft a recent memo to the Biden team on how financial regulation could be used to shape climate policy.

Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank President Raphael Bostic, the first Black regional Fed president, was an assistant secretary at the Department of Housing and Urban Development during the first Obama administration and wrote an influential essay this summer on why the country needed to address racial wealth and income inequality.