for ultra-low rates even as the unemployment
rate has reached a near-half-century low of 3.6%.
Shelton recently served as U.S. executive director
for the European Bank for Reconstruction and
Development, a multilateral institution set up
in 1991 to help former communist countries
transition to market economies. She was
previously a scholar at the Hoover Institution at
Stanford University.
Besides Shelton, Trump has also nominated
Christopher Waller, director of research at the
St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank, for a second
vacancy on the seven-member Fed board. If
both nominees are confirmed by the committee
and then by the full Senate — both controlled
by Republicans — Trump will have installed six
of the seven Fed governors.
Waller said in prepared testimony that he
has attended more than 60 meetings of the
Fed’s policymaking committee. Before joining
the St. Louis Fed he worked as an academic,
researching monetary policy, for 25 years.
Waller is a far more conventional choice for the
board. Some of his most widely cited research
examines the benefits of the central bank’s
independence from political interference.
Shelton, however, has been a skeptic of the
need for the Fed’s independence, which most
economists regard as critical to allowing the
central bank to make delicate decisions on
interest rates and inflation that elected officials
might otherwise oppose or block. Many Fed
watchers worry that Trump may be weakening
the Fed’s independence with his frequent public
attacks on its chairman, Jerome Powell, for not
cutting rates more aggressively.