Lael Brainard

Lael Brainard served on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors from 2014 to 2023, becoming vice chair in 2022. She was consistently among the more dovish members on the FOMC, emphasizing the importance of achieving full employment and cautioning against premature rate hikes. Brainard was also a leading voice on central bank digital currencies and climate risk in financial regulation. In 2023, she left the Fed to become director of the White House National Economic Council. She had previously served as a Treasury undersecretary for international affairs. Her academic background is in economics from Harvard and MIT. Before her government career, she was a professor at MIT and Brookings Institution fellow. At Treasury, she played a key role in international trade policy and G7/G20 coordination. During her Fed tenure, she consistently emphasized that the Fed's policy framework should pay attention to downside risks and the distributional effects of monetary policy — in particular, the benefits of tight labor markets for lower-income workers who tend to be last hired and first fired in economic cycles. Her work on climate financial risk was cited in multiple other central banks' own frameworks.