From the White House:
Well, this is a crazy nomination. Documentation:
What Does Judy Shelton Believe GDP Growth and Inflation Are in 2019?
Judy Shelton Confuses Me: On Interest Rates, Currency Manipulation
“White House Considers Economist Judy Shelton for Fed Board”
This graphic summarizes my feelings:
Oh dear,
Only a person like Trump would nominate such a person.
I assume she must pass muster through the Senate. Perhaps this may ‘change’
If your critiques of Ms. Shelton’s insanity was not disqualifying enough, just take a look at the White House resume. Very weak and basically in service of right wing lunatics like Jack Kemp.
Not a judicial nomination, so Democrats may be able to fend of confirmation. Crapo has probably already been asked about committee action, but this White House is arrogant enough to ignore his answer. If I were Crapo, I’d stall. Trump is blaming the Fed for growthyh below 4%, making a Fed nomination a likely election talking point.
Chris Waller will sail through. Ms Shelton will force the Senate to consider inflation-default wrt federal debt. If there is a problem with her being on the board it is her thinking she knows more than does the staff.
Agree. We discussed the possibility of her being nominated here before. I kind of thought she had disappeared, but here she is back again, and, yes, this is probably part of a campaign by Trump to blame the Fed for growth not being as super duper as he promised, even as he was just blasting away at Davos about how the US has the greatest economy the world has ever seen and all world leaders tell him that.
According to her Wikipedia page she doesn’t even have a macroeconomics background…or for that matter any econ background at all. She got her B.S. in education and her graduate degrees in business administration. If “business administration” means finance (which in her case I seriously doubt), then that would at least be tangentially relevant for a job on the Fed; but if “business administration” means something like management or marketing (seems more likely), then she’s doesn’t have the academic chops for the Fed job. Of course, in Trump World it’s all about marketing.
Some MBAs take finance but not all. Some take marketing and Ms. Shelton does a knack for the marketing of lunatic ideas. But I see zero evidence that she understands what we normally call finance.
And even if she did understand finance, finance and economics are different disciplines. I would feel a whole lot better if the fed was populated by people who understand economics.
It is true that mastering CAPM and a lot of the other technical finance concepts is not nearly enough to understanding macroeconomics. But financial economics does play a role. But it strikes me that people like Kudlow, Stephen Moore, and Judy Shelton could not pass freshman finance. We certainly know Trump is completely incompetent at even the basics.
“In a 2015 Cato Institute session, Fed Board Nominee Judy Shelton discusses whether to trust or not official GDP and inflation statistics – she says no.
Steven Kopits: “I don’t like confidence intervals for two reasons: First, the word ‘confidence’ can be misleading. If the underlying data is bad”
So Shelton is following the Kopits playbook – the BEA data is “bad”.
pgl,
Actually I think our Steven Kopits is more reasonable than Judy Shelton.
Somewhat related and a real hoot:
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/mnuchin-attacks-greta-thunberg-says-she-needs-to-study-economics
The 17-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg truly seems to be getting under the Trump administration’s skin. On Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin took a shot at the teen during a press conference at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland after she pleaded with world leaders to stop investing in fossil fuels. “Is she the chief economist? Who is she? I’m confused,” Mnuchin joked. “After she goes to college and studies economics in college, she can come back and explain that to us,” he added.
OK Mnuchin is being a complete a$$ here but seriously – WTF does he know about climate economics? We know his boss is dumber than a rock on this topic.
The young lady had a nice reply to this arrogant mansplaining:
“My gap year ends in August, but it doesn’t take a college degree in economics to realise that our remaining 1,5° carbon budget and ongoing fossil fuel subsidies and investments don’t add up.”
Mnuchin should stick to macroeconomic policies including monetary policy – even though I doubt he knows much more than Judy Shelton.
Greta Thunberg is a true bright spot. She cares not one whit about what Trump thinks, and her mere presence can upstage him. And she doesn’t care about that either. Plus, she’s female, clearly intelligent, and not even remotely interested in being a pin-up. All characteristics that make Trump melt down.
And, she’s right.
When she does graduate college, I hope she chooses a public policy career or even politics. She is excellent at this stuff!
macroduck: “Not a judicial nomination, so Democrats may be able to fend off confirmation.”
All presidential nominations, including all judicial nominations, now require only a simple majority. Democrats will have no say in Shelton’s confirmation.
Mnuchin “After she goes to college and studies economics in college, she can come back and explain that to us.”
Mnuchin is the brilliant economist who told everyone that $1.5 trillion in tax cuts will pay for themselves. And that capital investment would soar off the charts.
Mnuchin has only an undergraduate degree in economics. For many students, undergraduate economics is often worse than no economics at all. About all they take out of their education is to fit every decision into a supply/demand curve — and how to justify being a libertarian a**hole.
Menzie
You always seemed to be a confused person. It is good that acknowledgement is the first step to recovery.
Ed
Ed Hanson: Yes, statements like when you attack rho coefficients is confusing.
Oh gag, Ed. You are the clown who thinks eyeballing figures to look at peaks and troughs is somehow superior to using statistical methods to more precisely analyze what the patterns in the figures are. This is sort of like saying you prefer just looking at a pile of stuff to figure out how much of it there is rather than actually counting the number of things that are in the pile of stuff.
Please, you are pathetically beyond being confused.
One of my favorite films. Probably watched it over 20 times (3/4 of those times with medicinal liquid to enhance the viewing). Got me to chuckle with that graphic Menzie. I was trying to think of a character in the film that would be analogous to Judy Shelton. Maybe the surfer guys right before they air-lift Willard’s boat. Specifically “Lance” would be the character that represents Judy Shelton in the sad tale.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoQNQBGNISc
Willard on Lance:
“He was one of those guys that had that weird light around him. You just knew he wasn’t going to get so much as a scratch.”
“Charlie don’t surf”. Maybe that’s part of the reason America always loses the trade balance to Southeast Asia—-“Charlie don’t surf” (???)
Of course, while I’m really stretching out for analogies here, I could say that our nation’s economy, along with others suffering from donald trump’s clustersf**k on trade, would be the girl and her puppy, which makes Menzie the guy who says “I told you not to stop, now let’s go”.