JL, it ain't about religion unless you consider Gold Standard vs. Fiat Monetary system religion. Let's put a Zoroastrian or Wiccan in there just to stir things up as far as I'm concerned (an atheist would be better and many American Jews are really atheists when you get under the covers).
To extend that metaphor, I guess I'd have to consider those Gold Standard advocates to essentially be Pastafarians without any sense of humor. Fun to think about and laugh at, but impossible to take seriously.
While I agree with Obama that Summers should be respected for all his service to the country (despite some mistakes and being well paid for it) which is honorable, I'm mainly against Summers for a couple of reasons. #1 - He is way too close to Wall St. (when Main St. does well Wall St. does well, but not the other way around). #2 - He has too huge an ego already and it would get in the way of him making the "right" decisions at the Fed if there was any chance of him being percieved as "losing" and #3 - He's quite the misogynist as well if you know anything about him and have read his bio. He just doesn't play well with smart capable women and it makes him mistake prone when they are right as has happened many times in his career (opposing them so Team Boy can win).
My first choice would be
Stephanie Kelton, not only is she brilliant and understands macro-economics and fiat monetary systems, but she's hot as well.
Some other good choices in order of appeal to me (hoping this will stir some shit of course).
Elizabeth Warren. In 2007, observing that the federal government regulated toasters more rigorously than home mortgages, Harvard Law Professor Warren
proposed a Consumer Financial Protection Agency. Congress created that agency as part of Dodd-Frank in 2010, but President Obama, believing Warren too liberal to win Senate confirmation, appointed Richard Cordray director of the new agency instead. The “economic” issue here was the marketability of Warren herself.
Obama’s political calculus proved wrong. Cordray was no better able than Warren to win Senate confirmation, not because of any animus against Cordray (who was highly qualified) but because Cordray’s Republican Senate opponents were out to gut the agency itself. So Obama gave Cordray a recess appointment whose constitutionality came into question after a federal court challenged two other recess appointments that Obama made at the same time to the National Labor Relations Board. Eventually the whole mess got sorted out when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid threatened to eliminate filibusters for executive appointments (excepting judgeships) unless Cordray and some other nominees were approved. In the meantime, Warren had put aside all doubt about her marketability by getting herself elected to the Senate. Score one for Team Girl.
Warren has long argued for breaking up the big banks in order to avoid future bailouts and promote greater financial stability. The Obama administration (particularly Treasury Secretary
Tim Geithner ) opposed this option when the Dodd-Frank bill was being drafted. Since then, the banks have gotten bigger and evidence of continuing financial mismanagement has surfaced in J.P. Morgan’s
“London Whale” episode and insider-trading scandals at the
Galleon Group and
SAC Capital. As a result,
even many conservatives are now on board with limiting bank size.
Warren
recently cosponsored, with Sen. John McCain, a bill to effectively re-impose Glass-Steagall, which separated commercial banking from investment banking until its repeal during the Clinton administration (at the urging of Summers, among others). You can argue whether restoring Glass-Steagall is the best way to tackle “too big to fail,” but not about whether Warren
bested a male CNBC host in a recent televised interview about her bill. It wasn’t even close. Better to have her as a senator though IMHO.
Brooksley Born. Now celebrated for recognizing back in the late 1990s that unregulated trading in derivatives–a major cause of the 2008 crash–threatened financial stability, Born was isolated and overruled when, as chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, she wanted to actually do something about that. After Born proposed having the CFTC regulate derivatives, she got steamrolled by Team Boy (in this instance, Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Arthur Levitt, Jr., and Summers himself, Rubin’s deputy and successor). Team Boy got Congress to pass a law making it
illegal for the CFTC or SEC to regulate derivatives. The 2010 Dodd-Frank law
reversed this catastrophically poor decision and put derivatives under SEC and CFTC oversight. Rubin later said he viewed Born’s proposed policy as “strident.”
Sheila Bair. Bair’s experience demonstrates that ignoring wise economic advice from women is one of Washington’s last surviving bipartisan traditions. After being appointed a CFTC commissioner by President George H.W. Bush back in the 1990s, Bair voted against exempting a certain corporation’s futures contracts from CFTC oversight (an exemption sought on the grounds that the financial dealings in question were too “sophisticated” to warrant regulation). She was outvoted 2-1. A decade later, the corporation in question, Enron, went belly-up and became a poster child for corporate fraud. By then, Bair was an assistant Treasury secretary for financial institutions. In that position, Bair sounded the alarm about subprime mortgages—another principal cause of the 2008 crash—but was overruled by Team Boy in the person of Fed chairman Alan Greenspan.
In 2006 Bair assumed her most important policymaking role as chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Commission. There she continued sounding the alarm on subprime mortgages, and pressed, unsuccessfully, for tighter regulations. She also dragged her feet in approving a recommendation by the international Basel Committee on Banking Supervision to lower capital requirements—a move strongly favored by both the banks and the Fed. Thanks to her resistance,
The New York Times’ Joe Nocera later
concluded, U.S. banks suffered far less from the crash than their European counterparts, which had adopted the recommendation and were consequently more highly leveraged when the bottom fell out.
After the subprime market collapsed in 2007 Bair pressed hard (and unsuccessfully) for a much more ambitious program of mortgage modification than either Bush’s or Obama’s Team Boy was ultimately willing to embrace. As a consequence, the economic recovery that began in 2009 was (and remains) severely slowed by a sluggish housing market.
Christina Romer. As chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, Romer encountered much the same male condescension experienced by Born and Bair. Romer was convinced the economy needed $1.8 trillion of stimulus to recover from the 2008 crash. Summers, then director of the National Economic Council, told her to lower that estimate, which she did to $1.2 trillion. Then Summers refused to include that figure in a memo he sent to the president—not because he disagreed with the economics, but because he couldn’t bear the humiliation of having Congress knock that figure lower. According to one colleague quoted in Noam Scheiber’s 2011 book
The Escape Artists, “He had a view that you don’t ever want to be seen as losing.” In the end, the stimulus ended up totaling about $1 trillion, which, most economists agree, was insufficient.
Janet Yellen. The Fed is the
only policymaking body in Washington actively working to reduce joblessness. Much of the credit belongs to the current chairman, Ben Bernanke. But Yellen was on the case long before. A recent
Bloomberg analysis concluded that the Fed’s decision to put unemployment on equal footing with inflation as a concern driving monetary policy basically amounted to Bernanke, who initially was focused entirely on price stability, coming around to Yellen’s point of view. She's probably make a great Fed chief because she is under the radar and low profile and would be that much more ignored and under the radar as a woman, which is unfortunately true, but in this case a good thing. High profile Fed chiefs have been disastrous for us.
Bar Rafaeli. Well it would make JL happy and she's hot
Who do you vote for for Fed Chairman
