Swift Pushback on Stephen Moore, Trump's Latest Pick for the Fed
(Bloomberg) -- Stephen Moore drew swift and unusually pointed criticism after President Donald Trump picked him to be a governor of the U.S. Federal Reserve, with at least one prominent Republican economist calling on the Senate to block the appointment.
“He does not have the intellectual gravitas for this important job,” Greg Mankiw, a Harvard professor who was chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush, wrote in a blog post on Friday. “It is time for senators to do their job. Mr. Moore should not be confirmed.”
Moore’s selection is subject to Senate approval. He’s Trump’s sixth nomination to the nation’s monetary authority, which has a seven-seat board of governors that typically is filled with trained economists, former financial-industry executives and bank regulators. There are currently two vacant seats.
Two previous Trump nominees, Nellie Liang and Marvin Goodfriend, failed to advance in the Senate in 2018. Unlike Moore, neither faced accusations that they were unqualified.
Puzzling Pick
Some private-sector economists who’ve generally supported Trump’s efforts to accelerate growth with lower taxes, less regulation and fairer trade deals were nonplussed by the selection of Moore, an official at the conservative Heritage Foundation think-tank and an economic adviser to Trump’s 2016 campaign.
“The fact that Stephen Moore gets nominated and has a plausible path to confirmation but Peter Diamond didn’t is truly detestable,” said Neil Dutta, head of economics at Renaissance Macro Research. He was referring to Diamond, a Nobel Prize-winning economist whom President Barack Obama nominated to the Fed but ended up withdrawing from consideration in June 2011 in the face of Republican opposition.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/swift-pushback-on-stephen-moore-trumps-latest-pick-for-the-fed/ar-BBVaEOu?li=BBnb7Kz
