WASHINGTON—United States Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN), a member of the Senate Banking Committee, today joined Kudlow on Fox Business to discuss President Biden’s latest nominees to the Federal Reserve that will be before the Banking Committee on Thursday.
Partial Transcript
Hagerty on Federal Reserve nominee Sarah Bloom Raskin: “I’m very concerned about what I’ve read about Ms. [Sarah Bloom] Raskin as well. Larry, you know, the dual mandate of the [Federal Reserve] is clear: It’s about unemployment, maximizing employment, and keeping prices stable. It’s not about social engineering. It’s not about destroying industries that they may have some disagreement with. And it seems as though she wants the financial regulatory system to wage war on the oil and gas industry. We’ve seen this with Operation Choke Point in the Obama Administration. You know, they’ve gone after the gun industry, they’ve gone after prison industry, now they want to take on oil and gas. Who knows what’s next?”
Hagerty on Biden’s nominees’ misplaced priorities: “It has nothing to do with central banking. Again, this is not about using the regulatory system to go and do social engineering or wage war on certain industries. This is about getting people that are going to keep the main mandates in place. Again, stable prices in America, full employment. That’s where their focus should be. You have someone like, say Sarah Bloom Raskin, who’s talked about the need for regulators, for financial regulators to ‘reimagine their roles’ as we quote, ‘reimagine the economy,’ meaning a new economy—a new economy in her view that would have no oil and gas industry in it. If you think about what’s happened when we’ve seen oil and gas shocks. People that don’t have electric vehicles certainly do need the oil and gas industry to be in place. People are trying to heat their homes in the Northeast need the oil and gas industry. And people that are paying 50 percent more for their energy right now are having a huge problem. We don’t need our financial regulators waging war on the oil and gas industry here in America. We need to strengthen our energy independence, not hurt it.”
Hagerty on the Biden Administration’s use of financial nominees to advance their political agenda: “I think these nominees are troubling because what it indicates to us is that they’re looking for people with far-left points of view. And again, those sorts of points of view don’t belong in the Fed. We’re talking about an agency that’s got huge responsibility. We can’t be contorting financial regulations to accomplish these sorts of short-term goals that can change with the wind, whether it’s, again, reengineering our society or our economy.”
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