Barr sworn in as Fed vice chair for supervision

The Federal Reserve Board will have a full complement of governors heading into next week’s Federal Open Market Committee meeting.

Michael Barr was sworn in as the board’s seventh member Tuesday morning. As vice chair for supervision, he will set the Fed’s regulatory and supervisory agenda for a four-year term ending July 13, 2026. His term as a governor ends on Jan. 1, 2032.

Federal Reserve Board of Governors

The Senate confirmed Barr to both positions last week on a bipartisan basis by a pair of identical 66-28 votes. He joins the board and the FOMC as the central bank weighs drastic measures to curtail 40-year-high inflation and looks to update a host of regulatory policies.

Barr is the final piece of President Biden’s Fed appointee class that included Lisa Cook, a former economics professor at Michigan State University, and Philip Jefferson, a onetime Davidson College administrator, both of whom joined the board in May. Biden also reappointed Jerome Powell to the position of chair and tapped Gov. Lael Brainard to serve as vice chair.

Barr was the Biden administration’s second pick for the vice chair for supervision position, which was held by Trump appointee Randal Quarles until last October. Barr was nominated in April, shortly after the White House’s first choice, former Fed governor and Treasury official Sarah Bloom Raskin, withdrew from consideration amid a controversy over her involvement with a Colorado financial technology company. 

Raskin’s contentious nominating hearing put the spotlight on how banks and nonbanks are granted access to the Fed’s payment system and sparked an ongoing power struggle between the Senate Banking Committee and the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. 

Barr, on the other hand, was approved by the committee with relative ease. Key senators, including Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, the committee's ranking Republican, praised his experience and commitment not to expand the Fed’s statutory mandates.

Barr’s career in financial policy and regulation spans a quarter of a century, dating to stints in the State and Treasury departments during the Clinton administration. In the Obama White House, he served as assistant secretary of the Treasury for financial institutions and played a crucial role in implementing Dodd-Frank. 

Federal Reserve

Michael Barr's an excellent pick to be Fed's vice chair of supervision

May 6, 2022 10:48 AM

After leaving public office, Barr held a series of teaching and administrative positions at the University of Michigan. On Monday, he stepped down as the dean of the university’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. 

Barr has also advised and invested in dozens of financial technology companies, a point of contention among progress activist groups and left-leaning Democrats that appears to have contributed to his falling out of the running last year to be comptroller of the currency. But little was made of these investments during his nominating process. Barr has divested all of his fintech holdings.