With Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell’s current term coming to an end in May, the question wasn’t whether Donald Trump would choose someone new, but rather who’d get the nod. On Friday morning, the president ended the suspense. MS NOW reported:
President Donald Trump said Friday that he plans to nominate Kevin Warsh as the next chair of the Federal Reserve. Warsh would succeed Jerome Powell, whom Trump has repeatedly attacked for failing to cut interest rates. […]
Trump’s pick is a favorite among Republican circles. Warsh, a former Morgan Stanley investment banker, was a governor on the Fed’s board in the early 2000s after being nominated by then-President George W. Bush. He is now a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
Even if Warsh’s background, qualifications and vision were flawless, there would be reason for skepticism of Trump’s choice: The president has made no secret of the fact that he rejects the independence of the Federal Reserve and wants greater White House control over the nation’s monetary policies.
Warsh, in other words, was chosen as part of a larger, radical agenda that warrants congressional pushback.
Indeed, this is not lost on Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who’s retiring at the end of the year and who said he’ll oppose Warsh’s nomination — not on its merits, but because of the Justice Department’s baseless investigation into Jerome Powell, the incumbent Fed chair who was targeted as part of a brazen political campaign.
Nevertheless, it’s also true that Warsh’s background, qualifications and vision are not flawless.
The former banker has long benefited from family connections, and as the Associated Press reported, “Warsh’s father-in-law is Ronald Lauder, heir to the Estee Lauder cosmetics fortune and a longtime donor and confidant of Trump’s.” (Lauder is the same billionaire who helped persuade Trump to try to acquire Greenland.)
Economist Paul Krugman took a deeper dive into Warsh’s record and found a man who has peddled “confused and incoherent” arguments and who “throws around a lot of big words that presumably sound impressive to people who don’t know anything about the subject,” though “there’s no coherent argument behind the verbiage.”
Warsh was nominated, Krugman added, in part because “he has always been very good at ingratiating himself with influential people” and in part because “he’s a Republican loyalist, who always wants to slam the economic brakes when Democrats are in power and step on the gas when Republicans rule.”
The Senate confirmation process is bound to be interesting. Watch this space.
