Investing.com – U.S. President Donald Trump and U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin reportedly met with Kevin Warsh to discuss the possibility of his nomination to replace Janet Yellen as the current Federal Reserve chair when her term ends next February.
According to a report from The Wall Street Journal citing a White House official, the three met on Thursday to discuss the possibility in a decision that Trump would like to have made by the end of this year.
Warsh has long been on the list of candidates and worked as a Fed governor from 2006 to 2011 and has worked as an adviser for both former Fed chairman Ben Bernanke and former President George W. Bush.
News of the meeting arrived as speculation continues on whether Trump will reappoint Yellen for a second term with many experts admitting they are skeptical.
Yellen has repeatedly avoided the question, saying in the September post-policy decision press conference that she had not discussed the matter with the President.
“I have said that I intend to serve out my term as chair, and that I'm really not going to comment on my intentions beyond that," she told reporters, insisting that she had only met Trump once and had not had an opportunity to touch base again.
Trump himself praised her performance but opted to keep his cards close to his chest.
“I like her and I respect her, but I haven’t made that decision yet,” the President told reporters this month.
Both Yellen and Warsh became frontrunners for the post on speculation that the President’s chief economic adviser and former second-in-command at Goldman Sachs Gary Cohn had fallen out of favor after criticizing Trump’s reaction to events surrounding a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville.
According to a New York Times report last weekend citing administration officials, the White House had created a short list of candidates for the post.
Apart from Yellen, Cohn and Warsh, John Taylor and Jerome Powell were said also to be in the running.
Powell is currently on the Fed Board of Governors while Taylor is a Stanford University economist who created the interest rate equation known as the Taylor rule.