(CNSNews.com) – When President Biden re-nominated Jerome Powell as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board on Monday, he said that Powell will make mitigating the risk of climate change “a top priority.”
“He has made clear to me that a top priority will be to accelerate the fed's effort to address and mitigate the risk that climate change poses to our financial system in our economy. Extreme weather has cost our economy over $600 billion over the last 10 years,” Biden said.
“We have to make sure our financial system can withstand climate change and is prepared to transition to clean energy. The fed must be a leader among central banks globally in addressing climate related financial risk,” the president said.
Powell “also underscored the importance of the Fed taking a more proactive role in the months and years ahead and making sure that our financial regulations are staying ahead of emerging risk be they from innovations and cryptocurrency or the practice of less regulated nonbank financial institutions,” Biden said.
The president also said he’s nominating Powell to a second term as Fed chair because meeting the challenge of keeping inflation “low and stable” and achieving “maximum employment” requires “patience, skill, and independence.”
“For all the progress we have made we know we still face challenges, serious challenges. We know there's a lot of fear and uncertainty in the country. We know it's tough for families to keep up with rising cost of gasoline, food, housing, other essentials. It's not just an American problem. It's a worldwide problem,” Biden said.
“Every country is dealing with the same problems emerging from the pandemic: Supply chain bottlenecks, disruptions caused by spikes in COVID-19, elevated prices. They are all taking a bite out of our family budgets,” the president said.
"Perhaps no entity pays a more important role in navigating these challenges than the Federal Reserve, because it's the Fed's job to balance two key goals. The first is to achieve maximum employment, to get as many Americans working as possible. The second is to keep inflation low and stable,” he said.
Biden said that when the United States was “hemorrhaging jobs and there was panic in the financial markets, J's steady and decisive leadership helped stabilize markets and put our economy track to a robust recovery.”
“Jay is a believer in the benefits of what economists call maximum employment. That's an economy where companies have to compete to attract workers instead of workers competing with each other for jobs, where American workers get steady wage increases after decades of stagnation, and where the benefits of economic growth are broadly shared by everyone in the country, not just concentrated for those at the top,” the president said.