Friday, March 22, 2019

REPORT: Trump Considering Nominating Super Inflationist to the Federal Reserve Board

Stephen Moore
UPDATE below: Trump Confirms

 Now multiple additional updates:
  • Kansas City paper refuses to run his op-eds---too many factual errors
  • George Selgin calls out
  • Larry White: I thought it was a joke.
  • Moore tweets
  • Benn Steil weighs in: Appalling 
The Trump administration is considering Stephen Moore for a seat on the Federal Reserve Board, Jennifer Jacobs, White House reporter for Bloomberg News, is reporting.

Moore is a crazed inflationist that would have no trouble lining up with Trump against further interest rate hikes.

This is what I wrote about Moore in December:
Oh, this is nuts.
It turns out that the supply-sider economist Stephen Moore is also an off-the-wall inflationist. He wants the money pumps on full blast and he wants that done now!
Moore said Sunday that the Federal Reserve is "the swamp" and President Trump needs to drain it.By this he says he means that Trump has the power to remove Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell and should do so.
In an interview with radio host John Catsimatidis on Sunday, Moore argued that Powell and the Fed are "wrecking our economy" by raising interest rates and unloading debt accumulated from quantitative easing. Moore, a fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said there is no inflation problem and called for more liquidity to be injected into the economy because "there's such a demand" for the U.S. dollar...
So a tiny bit of conservative monetary policy is swamp action? This  view is monetary Keynesianism on steroids.
Moore has a very good shot of getting nominated. In addition to his Trumpian-style inflationist views, I hear he is being promoted aggressively by Trump's National Economic Council director Larry "I'll take a heart attack for the President" Kudlow.

-RW

UPDATE

It's done.  Trump says he's picked Moore for Fed board.

UPDATE 2

Trump made his comment after getting off Air Force One in Florida.

UPDATE 3
UPDATE 4
UPDATE 5
UPDATE 6
UPDATE 7

From a George Selgin, Director, Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives
The Cato Institute, letter to The Wall Street Journal last week:
To the editor, 
While we at Cato hardly qualify as apologists for the Fed, I can’t resist defending it from Stephen Moore’s sensational claim (“The Fed is a Threat to Growth,” March 14) that its “deflationary” policies have “chopped 1 to 1.5 percentage points off real growth over the past six months.” 
“Deflation,” first of all, means an absolute decline in prices, and not merely a decline in the rate at which prices increase. And notwithstanding Mr. Moore’s assertion that “the consumer-price index has been remarkably flat or slightly negative,” neither the CPI nor any other popular price index has actually declined in during the last six months. 
What’s more, again contrary to Mr. Moore’s claims, “core” inflation rate measures, which exclude energy and food prices and are, for that reason, less volatile and more reliable inflation measures, have been both remarkably stable and very close to the Fed’s two percent target over the last six months—and longer. The core CPI rate has actually remained slightly above two percent, while the core PCE (Personal Consumption Expenditures) rate, the Fed’s preferred measure, has hovered just an insignificant smidgen below it. And while Mr. Moore may believe that the especially volatile commodity prices excluded from these core inflation rates are in fact the best indicators of the Fed’s stance, his opinion is sui generis, notwithstanding his utterly fanciful claim that Paul Volcker favored a commodity-price target...

UPDATE 8


UPDATE 9







at 4:36:00 AM

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