Randal Quarles, a President Donald Trump-appointed Federal Reserve governor, said Monday that he will resign in December.
Quarles was appointed to a four-year term as the Fed’s vice chairman for bank supervision, a role created after the financial crisis but never officially filled during the Obama administration, in October 2017 by Trump.
His term as the Fed’s vice chair expired in October. He could have kept his position as Federal Reserve governor until 2032.
Quarles’s term as head of the Financial Stability Board, an international regulatory group, expires at the beginning of December. Quarles officially stepped down as the head of the Fed’s internal regulatory committee when his term as vice chair for supervision expired in October.
As a former Wall Street lawyer and private equity investor, he was widely seen at the outset as an industry ally who would execute the Trump administration’s pledge to cut red tape.
With the backing of Fed chair and friend Jerome Powell, Quarles went on to ease a raft of post-crisis rules, arguing they were too blunt and onerous, drawing ire from Democrats who said the changes saved Wall Street tens of billions of dollars while increasing systemic risks.
“It is our responsibility to ensure that they are working as intended and, given the breadth and complexity of this new body of regulation, it is inevitable that we will be able to improve them,” he told an audience in 2018.
Currently, there are five Republicans on the board, one Democrat, and one vacancy. Biden may be able to fill three vacancies of the Fed’s Board of Governors next year as Governor Richard Clarida’s term will expire in January. Democrats will likely become the majority in the Board of Governors once the three vacancies are filled.
Amid economic overheating mainly caused by the Biden administration’s massive spending and supply chain issues, Quarles’s resignation may give Biden more leverage on the monetary policies including the timing of the next interest rate hike.
