Lael Brainard likes to chart her journey to the top ranks of American economic policymaking by starting with her childhood observations.
As the daughter of a US diplomat stationed in Poland and West Germany, Brainard was making “mental checklists” of the contrasting fortunes of communities around her in cold war Europe. On one side of the Iron Curtain was the “grey bleakness of communist factories and poorly stocked shelves”; on the other were the “new cars and thriving small businesses” of the west.
“Once I started working, I found myself compiling these checklists in Maggie Thatcher’s industrial towns, in auto assembly plants in Detroit, in financial crisis-stricken Mexico City, in agricultural towns in Senegal,” she said during a commencement address at the School of Advanced International Studies in Washington last May.
For the past eight years, Brainard has been using those economic antennas in her job as a senior official at the Federal Reserve. But next week she will carry it over to the White House, after Joe Biden tapped her to be his top economic adviser and director of the National Economic Council.
Brainard enters the White House at a pivotal moment in Biden’s presidency. Although much of his multitrillion-dollar economic agenda is now law, the focus will be on implementation. And some of the big challenges in managing the economy remain — from high inflation to the risk of a significant slowdown or even recession triggered by the Federal Reserve’s rate rises down the road.
“[Biden] is looking for continuity, for someone who’s fully aligned on the policy goals,” a senior White House official says. “The president has a lot of faith in her”.
Brainard was born 61 years ago in Hamburg. Her father Alfred was a US foreign service officer specialising in eastern Europe. As well as fostering an interest in economics, the cold war period generated a certain patriotism in Brainard. “Many children, I think, are told to mind their manners. In my house, it was always followed by the admonition, ‘Don’t forget, you’re representing America’,” she told Congress in 2009.
Brainard received an American education: first at a private high school in Pennsylvania, then at Wesleyan University where she received an undergraduate degree in social studies. Harvard University was her next stop, for both a masters degree and a doctorate in economics.
It was there, waiting in line in the cafeteria, that she met her future husband Kurt Campbell, who was a faculty member. They married in 1998.
For a third consecutive time, both will be working in senior roles in a Democratic administration: Campbell is now co-ordinator for the Indo-Pacific in Biden’s National Security Council. They have three daughters. In her spare time, Brainard likes to watch them play soccer and other sports, according to people who know her well. She is also a fan of the English Premier League.
Brainard’s first big job in Washington followed a professorship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and came during the late years of Bill Clinton’s administration, when she was brought to the White House by Laura Tyson, the only other female NEC director.
She was quickly thrust into the negotiations over the emerging markets’ debt crises and also became an international summit sherpa for Clinton. After the George W Bush presidency, which Brainard spent building the global development programme at the Brookings Institution think-tank, she returned to government as under-secretary of the Treasury for international affairs under Barack Obama.
Those were the years of the financial crisis, the start of heightened economic and strategic tensions with Beijing, and the eurozone debt meltdown, which meant she was frequently crossing the Atlantic with Treasury secretary Tim Geithner.
“She had a big seat at the table,” says Daleep Singh, chief global economist at PGIM, who worked with Brainard at the Treasury and served on Biden’s NSC.
At work, Brainard is known to be rigorous and demanding — and to many a role model. “She is extremely polished, extremely deep on the substance and the reality of the situation,” says one former colleague. “She has a great way of explaining concepts in a way that is not wonky,” adds Heidi Crebo-Rediker, a former chief economist at the state department during the Obama administration.
In 2014, Obama nominated her to the Fed. There, she emerged as one of the more thoughtful monetary policy doves, took a tough line on capital standards for banks, opened the Fed up to digital currencies and climate risk, and was key to launching the emergency credit facilities that helped the US avoid a financial meltdown at the start of the pandemic.
While at the Fed, she came close to being Treasury secretary twice: as the frontrunner in 2016 had Hillary Clinton won the White House. She was a contender again in 2020 but lost out to Janet Yellen after Biden won the presidency.
In 2021, Biden interviewed Brainard for the job of Fed chair: even though he ultimately renewed Jay Powell’s term instead, he offered her the vice-chair position. Clearly, she has continued to impress the president since then. “She’s not going to have a steep learning curve; she’s been in the White House before,” says Crebo-Rediker. “Her policy chops and intellect will tower over everybody there.”
