Most of President George W. Bush’s nominees to the Federal Reserve have earned accolades from across the economic and political spectrums. And then there’s Kevin Warsh.<\/p>\n
Bush’s nomination of the 35-year-old White House aide — a lawyer by training who would become one of only two members of the Fed’s seven-member board of governors without a Ph.D. in economics — has been greeted by criticism and bewilderment by some former Fed officials and economists. They point to his political connections and inexperience, and say the White House could have found a better-known, more qualified choice.<\/p>\n
“Kevin Warsh is not a good idea,” said former Fed Vice Chairman Preston Martin, who was appointed by Ronald Reagan in 1982. “If I were on the Senate Banking Committee,” which must approve Fed nominees, “I would vote against him.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
This isn’t a situation in which anti-Bush partisans are reflexively opposing a Bush nominee because the person is a Bush nominee. Bush nominated two people a couple of weeks ago to fill vacancies on the Fed. One was Randall Kroszner, 43, is a University of Chicago professor and a former Fed visiting scholar with a doctorate in economics from Harvard University. The other was Warsh. Kroszner has drawn broad praise a distinguished scholar. Warsh, not so much.<\/p>\n
So, what’s Warsh’s background? He’s a lawyer who spent the late 1990s working on mergers and acquisitions for Morgan Stanley. As Lee Price, research director at the Economic Policy Institute, said, “There are plenty of people who’d be better suited to that open seat than someone who was a lawyer, a mergers-and- acquisitions specialist and an NEC adviser.”<\/p>\n
If Wall Street gets nervous, Senate consideration of Warsh’s nomination could get interesting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One would need a full-time research staff to chronicle and monitor all of the unqualified partisans who were awarded to top government jobs because they share the White House’s ideology, but the Federal Reserve is supposed to be different. There are some things the Bush gang is just not supposed to mess with, and the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6591","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6591"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6591\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}