Who is Lisa Cook, first Black woman on Fed board, facing Trump ire?

President Donald Trump late Monday announced that he would fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, citing alleged mortgage fraud. The announcement came in a letter to Cook that Trump posted on Truth Social. It follows a series of threats from the administration and its allies and comes as the president pressures the US central bank to cut interest rates.

Here’s what we know about Lisa Cook.

Cook serves on the seven-member board of governors, which, along with five of the 12 reserve bank presidents, makes up the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), the Fed’s interest-rate-setting body. She became the first Black woman appointed to the board in the Fed’s more than 100-year history when President Joe Biden nominated her in 2022 to a term ending in 2024. Biden then reappointed her to a 14-year term, which she is now serving and which expires in 2038.

Cook holds a doctorate in economics, a common credential among Fed officials, and was a professor of economics and international relations at Michigan State University before joining the central bank. Her research has focused on international central banks, financial crises, racial economic disparities, and the impact of innovation on the economy. She also served on President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers and worked at the Treasury Department in the early 2000s.

Cook joined the Fed as it launched the most aggressive rate-hike campaign in 40 years to counter surging inflation. She has voted with the majority of the FOMC, including Chair Jerome Powell, at every meeting since joining, including the five gatherings this year where policymakers kept rates on hold.

Weary of still-high inflation, Cook called the latest jobs report — “which showed a dramatic slowdown in hiring this summer” — “concerning,” adding that such a cooling could signal an inflection point for the US economy. She has not said whether she would support a rate cut at the Fed’s next meeting in September, which investors increasingly expect.

Cook faced a contentious, Republican-led campaign during her Senate confirmation. Critics including former Senator Pat Toomey and Senator Bill Hagerty argued her research focused too much on racial policies and not enough on monetary theory. Hagerty also accused her of lying on her resume, claims Cook strongly refuted.

In 2022, Cook was confirmed in a party-line vote, with Vice-President Kamala Harris breaking the 50-50 tie.

A Georgia native, Cook comes from a family active in the Civil Rights movement — her uncle Samuel DuBois Cook was a classmate of Martin Luther King Jr. and a prominent political scientist. She has written about how her background shaped her work.

In a New York Times op-ed titled “It was a mistake for me to choose this field,” Cook and co-author Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman described the challenges Black women face entering economics. “Few choose to enter the profession — just four of the 492 economics doctorate degrees conferred to women in 2023 went to Black women — and even fewer remain due to discrimination in publication citations,” they wrote.

Cook’s research has explored the impact of lynchings on patent applications, finding that the killing of Black Americans suppressed the number of patents that might otherwise have existed. Since joining the Fed, she has given speeches on artificial intelligence, innovation, and productivity, areas where the economics profession continues to grapple with technological change.

- with inputs from Bloomberg