He's the opposite of that tv show-Everyone Loves Raymond-to digress I've never loved Raymond so much either. I think that Felix Salmon makes a good point. There are three types of animals on the question of the next Fed Chairman
1. The Pro Larry Summers crowd
2. The Pro Janet Yellen crowd
3. The anti Larry Summers crowd
Of course what's notably absent is the anti Yellen crowd. Nobody is viscerally-or even rather mildly opposed to her.
"Then, look at the pro-Summers pieces, such as they are. You’ll find much less in the way of arguments on the merits from the likes of Ed Luce and Tyler Cowen; instead, you’ll find talk about style and politics — talk which even Brad DeLong, a good friend of Summers’s, finds unconvincing.
1. The Pro Larry Summers crowd
2. The Pro Janet Yellen crowd
3. The anti Larry Summers crowd
Of course what's notably absent is the anti Yellen crowd. Nobody is viscerally-or even rather mildly opposed to her.
"Then, look at the pro-Summers pieces, such as they are. You’ll find much less in the way of arguments on the merits from the likes of Ed Luce and Tyler Cowen; instead, you’ll find talk about style and politics — talk which even Brad DeLong, a good friend of Summers’s, finds unconvincing.
Finally, it’s worth looking at the anti-Summers pieces, especially from Scott Sumner, althoughNoam Scheiber is worth reading too. (And, if you want, you can disinter a bunch of my old posts on Summers, such as this one, this one, this one, and this one.)
The upshot, from doing all that reading, is pretty clear. The arguments for Yellen are very strong; the arguments against Summers are strong; the arguments for Summers are weak; and the arguments against Yellen are all but nonexistent. (While there are lots of people who think that Summers should not be Fed chair, there’s pretty much no one who feels the same way about Yellen.)
There are a lot of knocks on Summers. Indeed, Yglesias actually argues that this big story that broke yesterday-that Summers is leading the pack, that he's close to a done deal-may have been very well orchestrated by Yellen's supporters. After all, the narrative we're getting in response is mostly that that a lot of people don't like Summers and discussions about all his blemishes.
I tend to agree with Yglesias that the anti Summers criticism is overdone, I think he'd do a find job too:
"Personally, my view is that these criticisms of Summers are overstated and he'd do a fine job. But I also don't see any reason to think he'd do a better job than Yellen, and the idea of taking all this heat for the sake of Summers seems very odd to me. Clearly one major goal of the leaking is to clarify the extent to which that's the case—and it's been succeeding."
Still, while I think that Krugman is right that they're both very qualified, why not then go with the candidate with a lot fewer-in fact virtually no-negatives? After all, Summers just has lots of baggage. Conservatives of course don't like him. However, many liberals see him as the posture boy for deregulation and will argue that he can hardly be entrusted to perform the Fed's role as litigator. Indeed, there's a narrative that he's way too charmed when hobnobbing with Wall Street big shots.
He's also famously not known for working well with others-he tends not to worry about charming those he considers his inferiors. Noam Schrieber-linked above-suggests he might have been bettter in teh Greenspan-pre-transparency era. In today's Fed it's all about building consensus. If he were to have trouble working well with the FOMC, just a couple of contrary votes would really hurt him and the Fed's standing in the market.
We don't even need to talk about his baggage with feminists. This again points to why Yellqueen is the better choice-assuming the two are both eminently qualifed-as Ygelsias thinks and I agree-why choose the white male with a history of questioning women's innate abiliities and insulting Cornell West so badly that he left Yale for Princeton rather than appointing the first female Fed Chairman who everyone from Scott Sumner to Paul Krugman thinks is the better choice?
Krugman gets it in a nutshell:
"So what we have here are two highly qualified candidates, head and shoulders above anyone else I’ve heard mentioned and inconceivably better than the men who might have been in contention if that guy who ran with Paul Ryan had won. But if the final choice isn’t Janet Yellen, I think the president is going to have to offer a very good explanation of why not, or face a lot of grief from people who want to think the best of his administration."
He's a good friend of Summers as well.
P.S. Then there are those who believe that Summers really is a 'hard money man' like his mentor, Bob Rubin.
P.S. Then there are those who believe that Summers really is a 'hard money man' like his mentor, Bob Rubin.
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