Trump’s Pick to Regulate Banks Is Hardly a Shake-up

The populist, end-the-Fed wing of the Republican Party isn’t going to like President Trump’s choice for the critical job of overseeing bank regulation at the Federal Reserve. Randal Quarles, who founded and runs a Utah investment firm named Cynosure Group, is a Wall Street lawyer who worked for both Bush presidents and is married to a member of the powerful and wealthy Eccles family—as in Marriner Eccles, who was chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1934 to 1948.

In other words, Quarles, 59, is an important part of the GOP’s financial establishment. Not exactly the type to walk into the Fed’s headquarters—aka the Marriner S. Eccles Federal Reserve Board Building—and start channeling Ron or Rand Paul, the father-son anti-Fed duo. “Whatever else he would be, I don’t think he would be a disrupter of the Federal Reserve,” says Edwin Truman, a nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.