Clinton Names Fed Appointees

WASHINGTON, D.C.: Wall Street, sensitive to every twitch of the Federal Reserve, hardly reacted to President Clinton's nomination of Edward Gramlich and Roger Ferguson to fill the Fed's two vacant seats. The reason, TIME's Bernard Baumohl says, is that both appear to favor keeping interest rates low, demonstrating a mainstream, practical approach towards the nation's economy: "They're more balanced in their views, not the kinds of ideologues of the Reagan and Bush era who wanted to get inflation literally to zero." Gramlich, an economics professor at the University of Michigan, was former acting director of the Congressional Budget Office and previously worked at the Federal Reserve. Ferguson, who holds three degrees from Harvard University, is a securities and banking lawyer at McKinsey & Co. in New York. Their confirmation, says Senate Banking Committee chair Alfonse D'Amato, looks probable.