From Politico today:
Miran, who Trump noted worked as a senior adviser for economic policy at the Treasury Department during the first Trump administration, holds a doctorate in Economics from Harvard University.
Miran currently is an economics fellow for the Manhattan Institute and is a Senior Strategist for Hudson Bay Capital Management LP. Miran responded to the announcement shortly after Trump’s statement, saying he was honored to be picked for the position.
Google Scholar lists as peer reviewed publications:
Clemens, Jeffrey, and Stephen Miran. “Fiscal policy multipliers on subnational government spending.” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 4, no. 2 (2012): 46-68.
There may be other peer reviewed publications, but the ones I find are in the Manhattan Institute’s in-house journal. Bio here.
He and Nouriel Roubini argued that the Biden administration was manipulating debt management to keep interest rates low, in this piece.
update:
Link to Miran-Roubini paper.
Last publication in City Journal, here.
Head of NEC will be Kevin Hassett.
Basically, Miran is an inflation hawk forever bemoaning fiscal easing under the Biden administration. Fasten your seat belts because you can expect significant whiplash when Miran joins the Trump administration and slams his ideological gear shift into reverse.
Stephen Miran: “At the end of the day, government has to raise revenue via taxation. Higher tax rates are much more dangerous than lower tax rates.
Taking effective tariff rates from 2% to 20% seems way better than taking maringal [sic] income tax rates from 30% even higher.”
In other words, better that everyone else be taxed rather than high income one-percenters.
By the way, as a Harvard trained economist, can we assume he has done the math on the amount of revenue he thinks he can raise with a 20% tariff on imports, even before considering substitutions? Has he done the math on the tax increase the tariff would represent on the median household? Or can we assume he will just lie about it?
And of course there wouldn’t be across the board 20% tariffs. Tariffs are ripe for Trump’s grifting and corruption in granting exemptions.
I had a peek at the Roubini/Miran piece, just to see what they think Treasury has been up to. Their claim is that Treasury has engaged in a repetition of “Operation Twist”, in which Treasury sold bills to redeem coupons back in 1961. Here’s a discussion of the original Operation Twist, as well as its relationship to quantitative easing, from the Richmond Fed:
https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/econ_focus/2012/q4/jargon_alert
As it happens, the Richmond Fed referenced an Econbrowser post from 2011:
https://econbrowser.com/archives/2011/09/effects_of_oper
Perhaps Professor Hamilton would like to comment on Roubini and Miran’s claim that recent Treasury issuance policies have produced an economic impact equivalent to a 100 basis point reduction in the funds rate.
Personally, I think Roubini and Miran’s claims are pretty fragile, on two counts. First, the literature on the effect of Treasury QE and on the original Operation Twist don’t entirely support a 100 bp effect. Second, the assertion that Treasury is intentionally manipulating the curve seems unsupported by evidence.
Early research on the Fed’s housing-crash QE found that Fed purchases of risky assets – MBS – worked well by absorbing risk, but that Treasury QE did little. Some subsequent research (by Hamilton, for instance) found more significant effects from Treasury-purchase QE, but that was when the Fed was doing the QE. The 1961 Operation Twist involved both Fed and Treasury efforts, and some research scored the effect of the 1961 Operation at 100 bps. Roubini and Miran score a 100 bp effect while the Fed not helping, and is in fact is reducing its portfolio and not twisting the curve.
The Wu and Xia shadow funds rate estimate show the Fed’s own Covid-era quantitative easing had the effect of, at most, a 200 bp rate cut:
https://www.atlantafed.org/cqer/research/wu-xia-shadow-federal-funds-rate
Remember, the Fed’s purchases back then were massive. Furthermore, some studies find that the entire impact of Treasury-security QE is through anticipation of lower future fed funds rates:
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-effects-of-quantitative-easing-on-interest-rates-channels-and-implications-for-policy/
We cannot imply market expectations of future Fed rate cuts from Treasury’s issuance choices.
So I find the 100 bp claim interesting, but open to strong question. As to the claim the Treasury is intentionally twisting the curve, I have two objections. One is that anything Treasury can do, the Fed can undo, and would. Twisting the curve would be a waste of effort, and Yellen knows that better than anyone. The only reason to do something that won’t actually work is to grandstand for voters, but instead of grandstanding, Yellen denied any effort to manipulate the curve.
The other objection is that Roubini and Miran are relying on the duration of outstanding Treasury debt as evidence, when duration has been extraordinarily volatile in the Covid era. They claim to have identified a signal that could easily be noise. They also claim to have identified a particular intention – battling the Fed – when Treasury might simply be attempting to return the weighted average duration of outstanding Treasury debt to its pre-Covid high. Roubini and Miran actually link to Treasury refunding documents which show the weighted-average duration of outstanding Treasury debt is still higher than at any time prior to Covid.
Gotta say, though, if Miran knows enough about Treasury debt maturities, the history of yield curve manipulation and quantitative easing to make this argument, he’s better qualified for his appointment than almost any of Trump’s other guys. Not saying much, I know…
My only reservation is that Roubini is the first-listed author, and I know Roubini has the chops to write everything in this paper, without help from Miran. So maybe this paper isn’t really evidence that Miran knows much, and his portfolio of research is thin.