President Biden has nominated Sarah Bloom Raskin to be the Federal Reserve’s next vice chair for bank supervision, the most powerful banking regulatory role in the country. The nomination is notable because Raskin has pressed for tougher oversight of Wall Street institutions and is expected to be a much more aggressive regulator than outgoing Vice Chair Randal Quarles. Raskin has said she believes climate change is a serious threat to financial stability and has called for the Fed to pressure banks to curtail lending to carbon-intensive energy companies and exclude those firms from accessing Fed emergency lending facilities in the future. In a May 2020 oped for the New York Times, she referred to these activities as taxpayer supported subsidies for a dying industry. Raskin’s appointment would draw the Federal Reserve into the fossil fuel divestment debate and would likely accerlate concerns about stranded asset risks (the possibility that carbon-related assets face sharp write-downs due to regulatory changes or changing market conditions). The Bank for International Settlements, which has expressed concerns about sytemic financial stability issues arising from this process, believes losses in global wealth stemming from stranded assets could reach as high as $18 trillion.