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The Biden Administration was elected to office with an urgent mandate to change our current trajectory towards catastrophic climate change. Climate-focused financial regulation, or the regulation of markets to accurately account for climate risk and the social and material costs of climate-damaging activities, must be a part of this coordinated federal response in order to meaningfully address climate concerns at the governmental level. An agency that is particularly key to this goal is the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). The CFTC is one of the smallest federal financial regulatory bodies and yet it is responsible for regulating one of the country’s largest markets, derivatives. While it was originally founded to regulate futures trading in commodities, the passage of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act in 2010 expanded the CFTC’s mandate to include swaps markets and broadened the agency’s role in regulating other derivatives, in part due to their extreme volatility and outsized role in the 2008 financial crisis. 

President Biden signed the elusive bipartisan infrastructure bill into law on November 15th. It’s just the first part of a planned two-part infrastructure push, the other being the Democrat-only Build Back Better Act which Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have slashed to pieces. Yet Biden keeps calling the bipartisan bill he signed a climate bill. 

Yi is the latest BigLaw revolver and corporate ally to join the Biden Administration.

Powell did not meet with any non-governmental individuals who are not members of or aligned with the financial industry. This stands in stark contrast to Powell’s predecessor, Janet Yellen, who is now the Secretary of the Treasury.

Harvard President Larry Bacow announced mid-afternoon on September 9th that the Ivy League university — whose 53.2 billion endowment exceeds the GDP of over 100 countries — would officially end its investments in fossil fuels. That announcement set off a domino reaction of divestment announcements from Dartmouth, the California State University system, Boston University, the University of Minnesota, the University of Toronto, the MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Netherlands’ largest pension fund, and hundreds of other groups. They appear to see the writing on the wall that fossil fuel investments, beyond being morally egregious, are also no longer profitable.

The process of enhanced oil recovery that Crabtree champions is dangerous. Aside from the considerable economic and scientific barriers to scale, discussed below, the model of the CCT Crabtree supports rests on an unethical premise: that decarbonization should be profitable for Big Oil.

There is no assurance whatsoever that Quarles’ successor will have anything close to Quarles’ own power, should Biden refuse to nominate a new Federal Reserve Chair.

Rahm Emanuel’s nomination is not the first time a Biden pick advanced despite Democratic opposition.

Donald Trump and his Department of Justice consistently made a mockery of the law throughout his four years in power. And while their laughable reasoning and indefensible positions were struck down at a historic rate, many cases were still waiting for Biden. The new administration tossed out a handful immediately but an alarming number remain, either in some form of pause or advancing forward with the Biden administration adopting Trump’s position.

It is very possible that President Biden will show up empty-handed to COP26 in Glasgow next week. And that isn’t just because of the apocalyptic vanity of two Senators from Arizona and West Virginia. Many executive-led policies that are just a matter of political will have not been done, and some of those which have are pure paper tigers. Biden’s administration failed last week to take advantage of a lesser known, but extremely meaningful climate action opportunity. The Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) released its long-awaited report on climate-related financial risk, which the President personally ordered months ago. And it was a complete flop. 

To truly bring an end to the Covid-19 pandemic which has ravaged the globe, the Biden administration must embrace a strategy of vaccine equity.

It’s highly probable that Powell guessed in advance that October would be a rough month for stocks, and made a multi-million dollar choice to get out.

Califf coordinates lobbying for major corporations — in his case, for Big Tech giants eager to get into the medical sector (and get into patients’ medical data.)

The deeper problem with this argument gets at one of the most fascinating, least discussed dynamics of the Fed: the fact that it is an extraordinarily top-heavy institution, perhaps more than any part of the federal executive branch. 

The Revolving Door Project makes a point of watching independent agencies, those oft-overlooked entities, closely. As a result, we’ve had reason to give a great deal of thought to the purpose and meaning of “independence” in the agency context. As “independence” is invoked as a shield in other settings, that thinking may prove instructive.