Way-left Bernstein should not get key economic post (May 9): The Senate Banking Committee on Thursday ought to kill the nomination of left-wing academic Jared Bernstein for the chairmanship of the Council of Economic Advisers. Bernstein clearly lacks the necessary credentials, wisdom, and objectivity.
The Council of Economic Advisers chair should be a dispassionate economist, but Bernstein is a crusading leftist ideologue. The Atlantic in 2020 said “progressives” saw him as “Joe Biden’s Man of the Left,” someone who “would be a savvy insider whose backroom machinations” would “shove” the administration far away from the center. Bernstein has pushed radical policies against fossil fuels — directly hurting the economy of Montana, whose Democratic senator, Jon Tester, sits on the Banking Committee — and Bernstein so fully shares the identity politics obsessions of the Left that he wants the Federal Reserve to take on a new mission of “delivering more racial equity.”
This is the same Fed that already fails at one of its two primary missions — that of keeping inflation in check. Yet Bernstein has a record of advocating highly inflationary policies such as the spending binges of the Biden administration, all while ludicrously predicting that resulting inflation would be only “transitory.” Instead, the policies he pushed caused inflation to rise to, and remain at, the highest levels in 40 years….
Federal Reserve Board should keep rates steady for now (May 10): While the inflation report released today is not encouraging, it’s also not a disaster. There is good reason for the Federal Reserve Board to pause its series of interest-rate hikes and instead wait and watch while keeping rates steady.
I write this as a decades-long anti-inflation hawk. Rather than inflation-fighting being a co-equal goal for the Fed along with full employment, I wish it were the primary goal.
Even from that vantage point, though, the economy needs a Fed pause to refresh……
