President Barack Obama’s appointment of three Federal Reserve governors will bring the board to full strength for the first time in four years.
Mr. Obama on Thursday announced his choice of San Francisco Fed President Janet Yellen to be vice chairman of the board of governors, and named Sarah Bloom Raskin, Maryland’s commissioner of financial regulation, and Peter Diamond, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to the seven-person board.
The three appointments are all subject to Senate confirmation.
Ms. Yellen would replace Donald Kohn, who said in March he would step down June 23 after a 40-year Fed career. She would have a four-year term as vice chairman and a separate term as a governor; the White House didn’t immediately say how long the term would be.
She spent most of her career teaching economics and researching labor markets, joining the University of California at Berkeley in 1980. She also served as a Fed governor in Washington from 1994 until 1997, when she was named chairwoman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers through 1999. She became president of the San Francisco district bank in 2004.
Ms. Raskin has been Maryland’s top banking regulator since August 2007. She was previously managing director of Promontory Financial Group, a consulting firm, and worked at the New York Fed and as a counsel for the Senate Banking Committee.
Mr. Diamond, a specialist in taxation and behavioral economics, has written widely on overhauling entitlement programs. His 2003 book “Saving Social Security” was co-written with Peter Orszag, director of the Office of Management and Budget. He joined MIT’s faculty in 1966.
If confirmed by the Senate, the three Obama appointees would give the Fed a full seven-member complement of governors for the first time since April 2006. President George W. Bush tried to fill the slots with three nominees in 2007: Elizabeth Duke was approved in 2008, while Larry Klane and Randall Kroszner were blocked by Senate Democrats. Mr. Obama appointed Daniel Tarullo in January 2009.
