For a man who has been thrust into the political spotlight as President Trump’s appointee to the Fed Board of Governors, relatively little is known about Stephen Miran. Back in May, when Fortune profiled President Trump’s then newly confirmed head of the Council of Economic Advisers, he spoke candidly about his formative years and economic training, but it was hard to find many peers who had even heard of him. Heads of the CEA are typically either prestigious names drawn from top universities (Ben Bernanke, Jason Furman, Austan Goolsbee) or longtime Washington operatives, or both. Despite a brief stint at the Department of the Treasury during Trump’s first term, Miran—who’d previously worked as an economist on Wall Street—checked neither box. In fact, many sources I spoke to for that story didn’t even know how to correctly pronounce his name (it’s MY-run not MIR-an).
But it’s hard to escape his name now. In naming Miran to the Fed’s seven-member board, President Trump has ignited a firestorm with critics alleging that he is politicizing a vital and independent organ of the economy. At his first Fed meeting, in September, Miran indeed proved an outlier, voting for a jumbo, 50-basis-point reduction from the Fed, twice the 25 that carried the Federal Open Market Committee majority.
