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The first black woman on the Fed Board, a high-profile academic and economist, now finds herself at the center of an unprecedented political and legal battle...
President Donald Trump announced Monday that he had fired Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, accusing her of mortgage fraud, a claim that has yet to be proven. If his decision stands, it would mark the first time in American history that a female Fed governor has been removed from office. Cook's lawyers have threatened to sue the administration, sending the case into the courts.
Who is Lisa Cook?
Lisa Cook was appointed in 2022 by President Joe Biden and made history as the first black woman to serve on the Fed's Board of Governors. Her term was scheduled to last until January 2038.
Before her appointment to the central bank, Cook had a long academic career: for nearly two decades she was a professor of economics and international relations at Michigan State University. Her research focuses included racial inequality, the history of financial institutions, market crises, and innovation.
In the past, she served as a senior economist on President Barack Obama's Council of Economic Advisers.
A journey with political challenges
Her nomination became a bitter political battle in the Senate. During the confirmation hearings, Republicans questioned her qualifications, calling her “unfit.” However, she was confirmed with the casting vote of then-Vice President Kamala Harris.
As Fed governor, Cook has often been an active voice in debates over the impact of artificial intelligence on the economy and has aligned herself with Fed Chairman Jerome Powell on important policy decisions, including an aggressive interest rate hike in 2022.
Just on August 6, in a discussion hosted by the Boston Fed, she warned of weakening job growth and signaled that the labor market may be at a turning point.
Biography and academic achievements
Cook was born in 1964 in Georgia, to a family involved in the civil rights movement. She was the first student at Spelman College in Atlanta to win the prestigious Marshall Scholarship, which gave her the opportunity to study at the University of Oxford. She completed her doctorate in economics at the University of California, Berkeley. She has written and published widely on racial inequality and structural challenges in the American economy.
In 2019, together with activist Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman, she published an article in the New York Times, denouncing the lack of support for women, especially women of color, in the economics profession: “Economics is not a welcoming profession for women, and it is even more hostile to women of color.”
Cook is the granddaughter of Samuel DuBois Cook, a renowned political scientist and the first African-American to become a professor at Duke University. He was also a classmate of Martin Luther King Jr., tying the Cook family closely to the history of the civil rights movement in the United States. /Adapted from “CNN”
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