From Rappaport, Swanson, Duehren, in NYT yesterday, an interestingly monochromatic picture of the incoming economics team.
Notes: Clockwise from top left: Bessent (to Treasury; Yale; Key Square Group), Luttnick (to Commerce: Haverford; Cantor Fitzgerald), Hassett (to NEC; Swarthmore, Penn; AEI), Vought (to OMB; Wheaton, GWU Law; Heritage/CRA/Project 2025), Greer (to USTR; BYU, UVA Law; USTR and King & Spalding); Miran (to CEA; BU, Harvard; Hudson Bay Capital Mgmt), Navarro (to EOP; Tufts, Harvard; UC Irvine and EOP), Faulkender (to Treasury Dpty; UC Davis, Northwestern; Treasury, UMD).
Current administration counterparts are Janet Yellen, Gina Raimondo, Lael Brainard, Shalanda Young, Katherine Tai, Jared Bernstein, n/a, Wally Adeyemo.
“Navarro (to EOP; Tufts, Harvard; UC Irvine and EOP)” — and Miami Federal Prison.
Of the 15 economic advisors identified, how many actually have a degree in economics?
Richard A.: Hassett, Miran, Navarro and Faulkender have PhD’s in econ or finance. For Biden admin, Yellen, Brainard, Bernstein have PhD’s.
Hassett was the “expert” who created the inexcusable “cubic fit” model that projected that COVID deaths would go to zero by the end of May 2020. This provided cover for Trump to relax pandemic mitigation policies just as the pandemic was ramping up. He’s a loyal toadie who will say whatever his Dear Leader requires of him.
Hassett is responsible for a lot of deaths and no one should ever forget it.
Relaxing in the summer was the right move. You need to do better. Pandemics come in waves. So should dealing with it.
Hassett needed to do better. His model predicted Covid deaths going to zero and remaining at zero by mid-May, 2020. Hassett was in a policy advisory position. As this review of the decision process reports, there was no theoretical justification for the cubic fit model – it simply predicted what Trump wanted predicted:
https://www.vox.com/2020/5/8/21250641/kevin-hassett-cubic-model-smoothing
As a critique of Hassett’s performance as a policy advisor, joseph’s comment makes perfect sense.
Fredrick, by May 15, the day Hassett said deaths would go to zero, over 1,500 people were dying of Covid every day. Over 500,000 died before the first vaccine was released in January 2021. That certainly was not the time to relax pandemic policies.