- Lisa Cook is a Federal Reserve Governor appointed by Joe Biden in 2022 and reappointed for a term until 2038
- Cook is the first Black woman on the Federal Reserve's board of governors in its over 100-year history
- She has a doctorate in economics and was previously a professor and economic adviser under Obama
President Donald Trump late Monday said he would fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook for alleged mortgage fraud.
The announcement, in a letter to Cook that Trump posted on Truth Social, followed a campaign of threats against her from the administration and its allies and comes as the president seeks to ramp up his pressure on the US central bank to cut interest rates.
Here's some background on Cook:
Board Tenure
Cook serves on the seven-member board of governors, which together with five of the 12 reserve bank presidents makes up the interest-rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee. She became the first Black woman appointed to the board in the Fed's more than 100-year history when President Joe Biden nominated her in 2022. That was to a term ending in 2024. Biden then reappointed her to a new 14-year term, which she is now serving in and which will expire in 2038.
Cook has a doctorate degree in economics, common for Fed officials, and was a professor of economics and international relations at Michigan State University before joining the central bank. Her research has focused on international central banks, financial crises, racial economic disparities and the impacts of innovation on the economy.
Cook also served on President Barack Obama's Council of Economic Advisers and, in the early 2000s, at the Treasury Department.
Voting History
Cook joined the Fed at a time when it was embarking on the most aggressive rate-hike campaign in 40 years in an effort to thwart surging inflation. She has voted with the majority of the FOMC, and Chair Jerome Powell, at each meeting since joining the institution, including the five gatherings so far this year where policymakers kept rates on hold.
Weary of still-high inflation, Cook also called the latest jobs report - which showed a dramatic slowdown in hiring this summer - "concerning," adding that such a cooling could signal an inflection point for the US economy. She has not recently said whether she would support a rate cut at the Fed's next meeting in September, which investors and central bank watchers are increasingly betting on.
A Difficult Path
Cook faced an aggressive, Republican-led campaign against her during her Senate confirmation process. Critics including former Senator Pat Toomey and Senator Bill Hagerty questioned her research background, arguing that her work had focused too much on racial policies and not enough on monetary theory.
Hagerty also accused her of lying on her resume, an argument peddled by right-wing media sites and on a much-maligned anonymous economics forum, and which she strongly refuted.
In 2022, Cook was confirmed on a party-line vote in the Senate, with Vice President Kamala Harris stepping in to break the 50-50 tie.
Cook's Background
Cook, a Georgia native whose family was active in the Civil Rights movement - her uncle Samuel DuBois Cook was a classmate of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s and a prominent political scientist - has written frequently about how her background has shaped her life and work.
In a New York Times op-ed piece titled "It was a mistake for me to choose this field," Cook and co-author Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman wrote about the challenges faced by Black women entering economics. Few choose to enter the profession - just four of the 492 economics doctorate degrees conferred to women in 2023 went to Black women - and even fewer remain due to discrimination in publication citations, Cook and Opoku-Agyeman wrote.
Cook wrote a paper about the impact of lynchings on patent applications, finding that the killing of Black Americans suppressed the total number of patents that likely would have existed had those people survived.
Cook's expertise in that area of economics has distinguished her among policymakers. Since joining the Fed, Cook has given speeches about artificial intelligence, innovation and productivity - which the economics profession is grappling with as new technologies impact the workforce and other aspects of the economy.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
