An ex-goldbug, for gosh sakes.
Survival of the Wrongest
There has been a lot of commentary about Stephen Moore, the man Donald Trump wants to put on the Fed’s Board of Governors.
It turns out that he has a lot of personal baggage: He was held in contempt of court for failing to pay alimony and child support, and his past writings show an extraordinary degree of misogyny.
He misstates facts so much that one newspaper editor vowed never to publish him again, and he has been caught outright lying about his past support for a gold standard.
Oh, and he has described the cities of the U.S. heartland as “armpits of America.”
. . . .
Moore was wrong about everything during the financial crisis; he remained a fixture on the right-wing conference circuit, and in 2014 the Heritage Foundation appointed him as its chief economist.
Kudlow, who dismissed those warning about the housing bubble as “bubbleheads,” and warned about looming inflation in the depths of recession, also remained a right-wing favorite – and is now the Trump administration’s chief economist.
So the attempt to install Moore at the Fed is right in character.
And let’s be clear: The issue is not simply one of having made some bad forecasts.
Everyone does that now and then. It’s about being consistently wrong about everything, and refusing to learn from error.
Recently Moore declared that the Fed is “filled with hundreds of economists who are worthless, who have the wrong model in their mind. They should all be, they should all be fired and they should be replaced by good economists.”
Given the respective track records of the Moore and the Fed over the past decade and more, what he apparently means by the “wrong model” is a view of inflation that has repeatedly been proved right, as opposed to his own analysis, which has always been wrong.
But so far not a single Republican senator has questioned Moore’s qualifications.
When it comes to right-wing economists, what we see is a clear pattern of survival of the wrongest.
No comments:
Post a Comment