U.S. President Joe Biden’s nominee for head of domestic finance for the Treasury Department said Tuesday she would review the government bond market to make sure it works well during stressful times.
Nellie Liang, a former Federal Reserve economist nominated as Treasury Undersecretary for Domestic Financing, appeared at a Senate Finance Committee confirmation hearing along with three other candidates for senior positions in the department.
Liang said that if affirmed, it would “provide an assessment of the changes in this market resulting from advances in technology and changes in the behavior of market participants, and recommend guidelines as needed to ensure a stable treasury note market.”
She also said her “priority is promoting an efficient and stable financial system that can meet the needs of a dynamic economy”.
The others who appeared were: Lily Batchelder, who was nominated as Assistant Secretary for Tax Policy; Ben Harris as Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy; and Jonathan Davidson as Assistant Secretary for Legislative Affairs.
Batchelder, a New York University tax law professor who served as chief tax advisor to the Senate Finance Committee from 2010 to 2014, agreed with the US Treasury Department’s stance on digital service taxes in countries that discriminate US technology companies, a focus of the international tax negotiations at the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.
“In general, I have a bias towards our taxes targeting a specific industry, and certainly those that focus only on US companies,” Batchelder said, adding that they will be informed of the status of the OECD talks got to. “And even if it was just one industry as a whole, there would have to be a very strong reason why taxes were specifically focused on us.”
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Harris, who served as vice president and chief economic advisor to Biden’s campaign as chief economist for Biden, stressed the need for Congress to approve Biden’s plans to expand childcare for working families to bring more women into the U.S. workforce.
“Without a solution, particularly on the childcare supply side to childcare variability, I don’t think we will see the levels of participation we need to achieve the levels of growth we want,” said Harris.
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