WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy, M.D. (R-LA), member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, today announced his opposition to President Biden’s nomination of Sarah Bloom Raskin, an avid anti-U.S. energy activist, to be Vice Chairman for Supervision and a Member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.
“President Biden has nominated someone for the Federal Reserve who has made clear she wishes to use the power of the central bank to effectively destroy the U.S. oil and gas industry. It just so happens that this industry employs as much as 12.5% of people in my state. The jet fuel, the gasoline, the plastics—everything we use essential to a modern economy—relies upon a vibrant oil and gas industry. The reason Russia has so much leverage over Europe is because Russia supplies European countries with natural gas. Now the United States is bailing out Europe by sending them our natural gas, according to an article this morning in The New York Times,” said Dr. Cassidy.
“For someone to be nominated who wishes to destroy the oil and gas industry, not on a rational basis, but based on a prejudice and a dream that we no longer need fossil fuel, is dangerous for the workers of Louisiana. It is dangerous for the consumers in this country. It is dangerous for our foreign policy and national security. In short, it is dangerous for the world. Our economy depends on clear-minded, nonpartisan monetary policies, not activists in the Fed carrying out an ideological and political agenda,” concluded Dr. Cassidy.
Nominated to a position separated from partisanship political manipulation, Ms. Raskin has frequently advocated for the Federal Reserve to use its monetary policy making power to punish banks that do business with U.S. oil and natural gas companies and drive capital away from the industry that employs hundreds of thousands of Louisianans.
In a Financial Times op-ed in January of 2021, Ms. Raskin wrote: “Supervisory adjustments will have to take climate disclosures into account and the Fed will need to use climate risk data to make decisions on asset purchases . . . Fiduciary duty rules, too, may need to be reimagined.” She continued, “2021 is the year to reimagine capital as a tool for accelerating and smoothing the transition to a world of net-zero carbon emissions.”
In September of 2021, Ms. Raskin published an op-ed in the Project Syndicate stating: “Financial regulators must reimagine their own role so that they can play their part in the broader reimagining of the economy.” Ms. Raskin also asks the question, “And how can regulatory changes relating to disclosure, access to credit, and pricing of risk support a rapid and just green transition?”
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