American Thinker: President Trump has chosen a huge winner for the Federal Reserve Board: economist and monetary expert Judy Shelton.
Start with her achievements: same as our friend Herbert Meyer, she forecast with near-date accuracy the economic collapse of the Soviet Union based on economic reading alone. It was a bold prediction, made two years before it actually happened, in 1987. She was criticized for it, but she knew she was right and doubled down. In 1990, she wrote a book called The Coming Soviet Crash: Gorbachev’s Desperate Pursuit of Credit in Western Financial Markets.” The book drew naysaying, too. They called her an extremist…except that she was right.
She also warned about the currency meltdowns in emerging markets that occurred through the 1990s. Her 1998 book Money Meltdown is a classic of the genre, explaining how these disruptive events occur and can occur — coming out right when Mexico, Asia, and Russia were going down. Someone with this kind of forecasting firepower alone is worth paying attention to. She’s exactly the kind of person you want at a place like the Fed.
So naturally, she’s already being subject to all kinds of criticism from the conventional-wisdomers and swamp aficionados — same people who told her she was nuts for forecasting the Soviet meltdown. They criticized her then and got left with egg on their faces, so off they go, criticizing her nomination again now. Not even the real leftists, such as Paul Krugman or maybe Joe Stiglitz have weighed in yet, but they will. The current ones holler at Shelton for pointing out the value of a stable money standard, such as gold, something she has stuck to her guns about — defying even Milton Friedman. read more
Back to the gold standard? Where our dollars value doesn’t float with the whims of the speculators, Na, who wants that?
Soros will be very pissed! Too bad scrotum face.
Great pick, Mr. President.
I was particularly taken by Ms. Showalter’s characterization of Shelton as focused on the people who live within an economic environment. She’s right: this is entirely consistent with DJT’s thinking.
Furthermore, it is also consistent with the realization that no matter how much data you record, how you analyze it, how you think about the aggregate numbers, all economic decisions are made by individuals based on their value hierarchy at the time they make the decision. Economic decisions are an expression of preference: valuing A greater than B. In human terms, there are no economic equations, which are expressions where what’s on the left of an equal sign evaluates to the same as what’s on the right side. Human beings, rather, deal with INequalities, using greater-than and less-than operators.
I’d love a return to the gold standard. A fiat currency can be leveraged for greater economic growth. The downsides are crashes and manipulations. It usually ends in some sort of devaluation. That destroys savings and eventually the currency. The disadvantages of fiat money outweigh the good.
Gold standard? Look where it got Gaddafi.
@Billy Fuster:
Gold Hi-Standard? No, it was a gold Hi-Power! (-: