McConnell: Senate Will Vote To Add Christopher Waller To Fed Board

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell signaled Monday that he plans to hold a Senate vote this week on the long-delayed nomination of Christopher Waller to the Federal Reserve Board.

Waller was first named by Trump on Twitter in July 2019, but the nomination wasn't formally announced until January. He the director of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

Waller was nominated by Trump along with Judy Shelton, a controversial pick who was voted down by the Senate last month. Waller, who regularly attends the Fed’s rate-setting meetings in Washington, is a more conventional selection.

There are two vacancies on the Fed’s seven-member board. Board members vote on the Fed’s interest rate policies and also weigh in on financial regulation.

Trump has picked four of the five current members of the board, including his elevation of Jerome Powell to the position of Chair. That hasn’t stopped the president from harshly criticizing the Fed, calling its policymakers “boneheads” for not cutting rates quickly enough last year. The Fed reduced its benchmark short-term interest rate several times since the start of 2019 and rates are expected to remain near zero for the immediate future.

Trump argues that the Fed should set rates even lower, even in negative territory, as central banks in Europe and Japan have done. Economists generally regard rates that low as evidence of an economy in trouble.

Waller is likely to support keeping interest rates low. He works for the president of the St. Louis Fed, James Bullard, who was one of the strongest supporters of rate cuts last year.

Waller “has been instrumental in helping shape Bullard’s view about the U.S. shifting into a low growth, low inflation and interest rate regime,” Kathy Bostjancic, an economist at Oxford Economics, said when Trump first floated Waller’s name in July 2019.