The nomination of a Nobel Prize winner to a seat on the board of the Federal Reserve will likely be blocked because a key senator says the economist is not qualified for the job.Sen. Richard Shelby, the highest-ranking Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, says he plans to oppose the nomination of Peter Diamond, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor, for a third time.
The opposition, which he stated at the panel's hearing on the nomination, raises the likelihood that President Barack Obama's choice for the Fed will be blocked again.
The Senate Banking Committee twice approved Diamond's nomination last year along partisan lines. He was never confirmed by the full Senate because Democrats lacked Republican support.
Do I really need to say any more than this? The guy has a NOBEL PRIZE. That means he's really smart -- as in groundbreaking smart. As in smarter than the average Congressman (which I understand isn't saying much at this point).
And -- he won his Nobel Prize for work on LONG TERM UNEMPLOYMENT. God knows we shouldn't be listening to him, or asking his advice on anything. After all, he's obviously not qualified to do anything regarding the economy, is he?
6 comments:
Par for the course.
Peter Diamond is an old fashioned, big government Keynesian. I'd say that disqualifies him.
The Fed Chair is all that matters. Volker, Greenspan, now the Bernak. These are the names the public knows. A better question would be, why does a Nobel Prize winner want to become a FED backbencher?
Anon -
Keynes was right.
This country's golden age of economic growth was defined by Keynes economic theories. Considering your tea party friends are determined to return to those by-gone idealistic eras (when leave it to Beaver represented a pyre American family), you might want to embrace the economic theories that brought them to you.
Just a thought.
And some people around here complain about Democrats! Sheesh!
We may sometimes get things wrong.
We may sometimes be underinformed.
But, dammit, we try to think and do what's right.
Republicans in office? Not so much.
The Nobel prize is a political football. It says more about ideology than smarts.
Biggering government gets credit for the boom from 1980 to 2008, but it also gets the blame for the current debt crisis. The debt crisis is not over. It will not be done until municipal, state and foreign national defaults are finished.
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