Lisa Cook, the Fed -Governor in the middle of a fire storm

Copyright © HT Digital Streams Limit all rights reserved. President Trump moved to Fire Cook, 61, on Monday, accusing her of committing mortgage fraud before joining the Fed. (AP) Summary The first black woman to have served as a Governor of the Federal Reserve is the center of an unprecedented power struggle that places the independence of the bank against the author’s authority. When Mary Parham Copelan in the early 1980s as a young black girl in Milledville, Ga. Cook, who comes from a prominent family in the rural city of about 17,000, told Parham-Copelan that, above all, she should recommend the audience of classmates in the school gymnasium to make sure her voice is heard. About 40 years later, Cook became the first black woman to have served as Governor of the Federal Reserve in Washington, a powerful seat that gives her a voice to set the track of the US economy. Now she is the center of an unprecedented power struggle that places the independence of the central bank against the authority of the president. President Trump moved to Fire Cook, 61, on Monday, accusing her of committing mortgage fraud before joining the Fed. According to Bill Pulte, a Trump appointment that leads the federal housing financing agency: two mortgage documents signed 14 days apart – one on a home in Michigan, where Cook learned, the other at an apartment near her children’s home in Atlanta, the specific appointment of the Trump who was the federal agency for housing, the other one. A house in Michigan. Cook, an academic economist appointed by President Joe Biden in 2022, refused to quietly and say that she believes she is shooting illegally and that she will fight it in a lawsuit. She has not yet given an explanation for the two mortgage loans that the Trump administration claimed to a federal crime. No cost has been submitted. Although it is never an outspoken member of the Fed’s board during her two years in the role, Cook was led as an economist by deep beliefs of her education in the south and her winding career, says friends and colleagues – including her belief that racial speed has deeply formed the economic fortune of black Americans. If she manages to challenge her dismissal, she will still plan to form Fed policy. Her term is scheduled to end in 2038. Lisa Cook, governor of the US Federal Reserve, shakes hands with chairman Jerome Powell after he took the oath of office in May 2022. Cook grew up a child of the civil rights movement. Her mother, she told a women’s business group in Charleston, SC, in a speech last year, said the first black faculty member at Georgia College & State University. Her father was a well -known chaplain in Milledville, about 100 miles southeast of Atlanta. Cook and her sisters were one of the first black students to decide the local schools, she said in the speech. “My family lived through the events that brought Milledville out of a deep segregated South,” she said. “I drew power from the example that my family, others in the civil rights movement, and the town that raised me.” Parham-Copelan, now the first female mayor of Milledville, is reminiscent of the Cook family as definitely middle class. Their mother led a Girl Scout troop. Other girls in the neighborhood strive to be like the Cook Girls. Their parents were prominent in the city, and the Cook Sisters were natural leaders, she said. Parham-Copelan said they have the importance of a seat at the table. Economics was not the first academic passion of Cook. She studied philosophy at the game man College, a historically black women’s school in Atlanta, and obtained further humanities degrees in Oxford and in Senegal. Cook traveled in West Africa and discovered a renewed curiosity about how the economy works during a routine service. “One of the first things I do is to buy a Bic pen,” she said of an interviewer in 2018, reminding her time in Africa. “Each was 10 dollars! Ten dollars! It stunned me completely. I knew how poor most people were. I knew students had to have these pins to write in their blue books. It has just started the whole line of thought. ‘ As a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley in the early nineties, shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, Cook looked at the study of the Russian economy and tried to work with Greg Grossman, a Cal professor who was an authority in the field. Grossman told Cook that if she could learn the language, he would adopt her as a student. Half and a half later, she stopped at his office and hit a conversation in Russian, the fifth language she learned, Cook remembers in a speech this year. When her academic career unfolded, Cook’s interest returned home to the racial divisions of the deep south. She started with historical records to explain diverse economic outcomes between white and black Americans. Several of her articles focus on Lynch, an example of the violence she and other researchers argued, hampered the economic opportunities for generations of black people in the 19th and 20th centuries. In an article of 2017, she used an extensive historical data set to make the matter that Lynch occurs more frequently in areas with more racial segregation. In 2018, she told an interviewer that as the public consciousness of racial issues increased, her work became more resonant. “With police shooting and mass shooting related to hate crimes, I think people are doing it now,” Cook said. In 2005, Cook was rented by Michigan State University, where she taught as a professor of economics and international relations. She maintained a home in Ann Arbor, about 65 miles away. Lisa Cook taught economics to Michigan State University before nominating to the Federal Reserve Board. In Ann Arbor, she goes into another passion, music and the arts, and serves as a board member and finally co-chair of an executive arts organization, the University Musical Society, from 2014-2022. While living in Ann Arbor, Cook also joined an informal group of professors from the University of Michigan and local business people who would meet periodically to socialize and discuss different topics. Cook was a regular and enthusiastic participant of the meetings, says Marianne Udow-Phillips, a lecturer at the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health and former director of the Department of Human Services under former Democratic Governor Jennifer Granholm. “She is very knowledgeable, but she is also a very good listener, and I have always been impressed with her as an ongoing learner, not just someone who feels as if they have all the answers,” says Udow-Phillips. Cook was one of the four officials who elevated Biden to the Fed’s advice of governors. During her confirmation of the Senate, Democrats praised Cook’s academic background, while Republicans criticized her lack of monetary policy experience. In 2022, she was confirmed in a 51-50 mood that fell straight on party lines, lifted by a breakers of Vice President Kamala Harris. For investors and economists who carefully locate the Fed, Cook knitted herself in the consensus decisions of the board of directors on interest rates and voted in interest rates in Fed chair Jerome Powell and the majority of the Fed. Before Pulte Cook accused of committing mortgage fraud last week, she did little to draw attention to herself. By Tuesday, those who know Cook – from Milledville to Michigan – spoke in her defense. Parham-Copelan promised that her friend of childhood would stand on her land at a time when “black women were attacked for no reason.” Betsey Stevenson, former chief economist of the Department of Labor during President Barack Obama’s administration and who served with Cook in the executive committee of the American Economic Association, said that, unless there is a real proof of a criminal act, and that she would risk the independence of the central bank. “Lisa Cook’s firing is a problem, no matter what you think of Lisa Cook,” she said. Write to Dan Frosch at [email protected] and Matt Grossman on [email protected], catch all the business news, market news, news reports and latest news updates on live mint. Download the Mint News app to get daily market updates. More Topics #Federale Reserve Read next story