U.S. Senate Committee Approves Fed, CEA Nominations

U.S. Senate committee approves Fed, CEA nominations

WASHINGTON, Feb. 16 (Xinhua) — The Banking Committee of the U. S. Senate on Thursday approved President Bush’s selections of Randall Kroszner and Kevin Warsh to be members of the Federal Reserve’s board of governors.

Kroszner, 43, is a professor of economics at the University of Chicago’s graduate school of business. He had been a member of the Council of Economic Advisers from 2001 to 2003.

He received a bachelor’s degree from Brown University and a master’s and doctorate from Harvard University.

Warsh, 35, who has served on Bush’s National Economic Council for the past four years, is a special assistant to the president for economic policy at the White House, managing domestic finance, capital markets and banking issues.

He previously worked for Morgan Stanley as an investment banker and as adviser on mergers and acquisitions. He received a bachelor ‘s degree from Stanford University and a law degree from Harvard.

The nominations of Kroszner and Warsh are expected to be approved by the full Senate soon so that the two men will be in place by the time of the Fed’s next meeting on March 27-28.

At the same time, the committee approved the president’s nomination of Edward Lazear, a Stanford University business professor, to be the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, filling the vacancy left by Ben Bernanke, who has become Federal Reserve Chairman since Feb.1.

Lazear was a member of Bush’s advisory Tax Reform Panel, which submitted proposals for overhauling the tax code to the Treasury Department last year. He has degrees from the University of California at Los Angeles and a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University.

His nomination also is expected to win approval in the full Senate.