Kazakh-American attorney and academic
Saule Omarova (Kazakh: Сәуле Тарихқызы Омарова ; born 1966) is a Kazakh-American attorney, academic, and public policy advisor who was nominated to serve as comptroller of the currency by President Joe Biden.[1]
Omarova is currently the Beth and Marc Goldberg Professor of Law at Cornell Law School, where her work focuses on financial regulation and corporate governance.[2] Omarova previously served as an advisor within the Department of the Treasury.[3] She is a Senior Berggruen Fellow at the Berggruen Institute in Los Angeles.[4][5]
Omarova was born in West Kazakhstan Region of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic,[6] stating in a 2020 interview with Chris Hayes that "I went to high school in a small, tiny Kazakh provincial town on the outskirts of the Soviet Empire."[7] Omarova graduated from Moscow State University in 1989 on the Lenin Personal Academic Scholarship.[8][9] Her thesis from MSU is titled Karl Marx's Economic Analysis and the Theory of Revolution in The Capital.[10] Omarova moved to the United States in 1991,[7] where she received a Ph.D in political science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison (UW), and a Juris Doctor from Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law.[2] At UW, Omarova defended her thesis, The Political Economy of Oil in Post-Soviet Kazakhstan.[11]
Omarova practiced law in the Financial Institutions Group of New York-based law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell for six years.[12] During the George W. Bush Administration, Omarova served in the Department of the Treasury as a special advisor on regulatory policy to the Under Secretary for Domestic Finance.[3] During her time as an associate professor of law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Omarova was a witness at a U.S. Senate hearing on bank ownership of energy facilities and warehouses.[13]
In August 2021, Omarova's name was floated as a potential contender to lead the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) under President Joe Biden.[14] She was chosen to serve as comptroller of the currency in September 2021, pending Senate confirmation.[1]
Omarova is noted for her support for a "National Investment Authority" (NIA),[15] a proposal she has likened to New Deal-era programs. The proposal was first developed in 2015 in conjunction with Robert C. Hockett, a fellow Professor of Law at Cornell Law School.[16] Omarova has stated that an NIA would be responsible for "devising, financing, and executing a long-term national strategy of economic development and reconstruction."[17]
In a recent paper "The People's Ledger: How to Democratize Money and Finance the Economy," she has proposed an "overtly radical reform" plan for the Federal Reserve to "effectively end banking as we know it", to offer consumer bank accounts and become "the ultimate public platform for generating, modulating, and allocating financial resources in a modern economy, calling this plan "ultimately a more pragmatic and sensible response to the challenge of democratizing finance." She has advocated expanding the Federal Reserve's mandate to include the price levels of "systemically important financial assets" as well as worker wages. [18] [9] [19]
The proposed NIA would be made up of two components: a "National Infrastructure Bank (NIB), as well as and a National Management Corporation (which she nicknames "Nicki Mac"), which would serve to invest in green technologies.[20] A 2020 article published in The New York Times reported that the proposed NIA would function in a manner similar to the Federal Reserve, and compared the NIA framework to the Reconstruction Finance Corporation created in 1932.[21]
According to a report by The New York Times, Omarova favors stricter regulations on cryptocurrencies and financial technology (fintech) companies.[14] In response to reports that Facebook may launch its own cryptocurrency, Omarova argued it was an example of "Big Tech companies [resorting] to ever more creative ways to expand a monopolistic and extractive business model under the guise of corporate activism."[22] In a paper by Omarova published in the Yale Journal on Regulation, "New Tech v. New Deal: Fintech as a Systemic Phenomenon" (2019), she argues that some financial technology applications have served as "destabilizing mechanisms".[23]