American attorney
Sarah Bloom Raskin (born April 15, 1961) is an American attorney and regulator, who was formerly a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and a former United States Deputy Secretary of the Treasury. Previously, she served as Maryland Commissioner of Financial Regulation and as a Managing Director at the Promontory Financial Group.[1] She is a Rubenstein Fellow at Duke University.
Sarah Bloom was born to a Jewish family in Medford, Massachusetts, the daughter of Arlene (née Perlis) and Herbert Bloom.[2][3][4] Bloom attended Homewood-Flossmoor High School in Flossmoor, Illinois, where she graduated in 1979.[5]
After graduating from high school, she went on to Amherst College where she graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa with a B.A. in economics in 1983, and wrote her undergraduate thesis on monetary policy. She received her J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1986. Raskin was honored with an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters by Muhlenberg College on May 19th, 2019.[6]
Raskin worked as an associate at Arnold & Porter and as counsel for the U.S. Senate Banking Committee.[7] Prior to serving as Commissioner, she was a Managing Director at the Promontory Financial Group. Raskin also served as chief financial regulator for Maryland.[8]
President Obama nominated Raskin to the Federal Reserve Board along with fellow nominees Dr. Janet Yellen, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology economics professor Peter A. Diamond.[5] Raskin and Yellen were unanimously confirmed as Federal Reserve Board governors by the United States Senate on September 30, 2010.[9] On October 4, 2010, both were sworn in by Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke.[10] As a member of the Federal Reserve Board, Raskin gained a reputation as someone focused on consumer protection and income inequality.[8]
On July 31, 2013, President Barack Obama announced that he would nominate Raskin to the second-in-command position of Deputy Secretary at the United States Department of the Treasury.[11] She was confirmed to the position on March 12, 2014 by a voice vote.[12] Upon confirmation, Raskin became the highest-ranked woman in the history of the Treasury Department at that time.[8] Raskin was sworn in on March 19, 2014.[13] Upon her confirmation as Deputy Secretary she resigned as a Member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System on March 13, 2014.[14] While serving her term, Raskin had a special focus on the macroeconomic impact of student loan borrowing and cyber security.
During the 2017–18 academic year, Raskin was a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law. During the 2018–19 and 2019–20 academic years, Raskin was a Rubenstein Fellow at Duke University. As a Rubenstein Fellow, the Honorable Sarah Bloom Raskin worked closely with the Rethinking Regulation program at Duke’s Kenan Institute for Ethics and with the Global Financial Markets Center at Duke Law School to improve the public’s understanding of markets and regulation. In particular, she led a research agenda that sought to shape a new relationship between regulation and resilience in financial markets. It also explored opportunities to harness cyber-data and turn it into a public asset rather than a liability.
In November 2020, Bloom Raskin was reported to be under consideration for Secretary of the Treasury in the Biden Administration.[15] In 2021, she was mentioned as a potential candidate to lead the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC).[16]
Raskin is married to Jamie Raskin, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Maryland's 8th congressional district ,[17] and as of 2006 lived in Takoma Park, Maryland.[18]
Raskin and her husband have two adult daughters, Hannah and Tabitha. On December 31, 2020, Raskin's office announced that their son Thomas (Tommy), a graduate of Amherst College and a second-year student at Harvard Law School, died at the age of 25.[19] On January 4, 2021, Raskin and her husband posted a tribute online which stated that Thomas had died by suicide after a prolonged battle with depression.[20][21]