Pri nas se javnost mnogokrat zgraža nad komuniciranjem med ekonomisti glede aktualnih tem ekonomske politike. No v tujini ni nič drugače. Komunikacija glede pravilnosti politike varčevanja med nemškimi ekonomisti ali med ameriškimi ekonomisti ni potekala nič bolj v rokavicah kot pri nas. Kvečjemu manj. Podobno se dogaja glede tega, kdo bo imenovan za naslednjega predsednika ameriške centralne banke Fed, kjer se odvija zanimiva besedna bitka med podporniki in privrženci glavnih dveh kandidatov. Nekaj linkov in citatov na aktualna mnenja najbolj vplivnih kolumnistov, ekonomistov in blogerjev. Za razumevanje ozadja pa prej preberite še Bitka za naslednika Bernankeja na čelu FED.
Brad DeLong: A Slight Preference for Larry Summers to Be Federal Reserve Chair
To be good choices for Federal Reserve chair, candidates must pass three tests. They must have experience at a similar job: this is not something to throw somebody into and expect them to swim. They must fear high inflation as they fear a tornado, and feel in their bones the pain of the unemployed. And they must understand and properly weight the different models of how the economy might behave. Right now, this third means that a good Federal Reserve chair must give a relatively high weight to the Keynesian model, which has been so successful at describing and forecasting the economy over the last six years.
Janet Yellen has a proven record of being able to build consensus inside the Fed. Larry Summers is the least likely to bind himself to an institutional consensus past its sell-by date. Only five potential candidates pass this threefold test: Larry Summers, Janet Yellen, Christy Romer, Alan Blinder and Laura Tyson. They are all, in my view, superior by far to others whose names have been mentioned. Superior, for example, to a Tim Geithner who gives no sign of feeling in his bones the pain of the unemployed, or a Donald Kohn whose estimates of both growth and inflation have been erroneously high since 2007. A choice of any of the five would be a good outcome. A choice of anybody else would be a bad outcome.
Among those five, Janet Yellen has an edge in long-term Fed experience and has a proven record of being able to build consensus inside the institution. Larry Summers has an edge as the most creative thinker likely to successfully think outside the box should outside-the-box thinking be called for, and least likely to bind himself to an institutional consensus past its sell-by date. If times are placid, the stakes are small. If times are turbulent, outside-the-box thinking has its place.
Therefore I have a slight preference for Summers.
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Ezra Klein: Six of Janet Yellen or Half-Dozen of Larry Summers?
Yet, the race between them has generated extraordinary political heat. News that the White House is leaning toward Summers rocked Capitol Hill, leading almost half of Senate Democrats to sign a letter in support of Yellen. This is, to put it lightly, a surprise. I’ve spoken to quite a few Senate Democrats about economic policy, and even monetary policy, and Yellen’s name has never come up.
Their letter is really about Summers, even though his name is never mentioned. Liberal senators hold incredibly strong opinions on the controversial economist. They blame Summers for the financial deregulation of the 1990s, and even if they could forgive that, they resent his opposition in 2010 to the Volcker rule, a proposal in the Dodd-Frank reforms to restrict banks from using deposits to make proprietary trades. That he has taken a bunch of money from Wall Street in the interim doesn’t make them any happier.
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Matthew O’Brien: The Sexist Attacks on Janet Yellen Have to Stop
A few weeks ago, Ezra Klein wrote about the “subtle, sexist whispering campaign” against Janet Yellen, but I didn’t really believe it. (Hey, I’m a white guy). Yellen, the current Fed number two, is so obviously qualified and respected that I thought it was pretty much a given that she’d get nominated for Fed Chair. It’s not. And it’s getting harder not to think that doesn’t have something to do with gender.
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I’m going to put this as politely as I know how: This is bullshit. Yes, there have been more absurd attacks on Yellen — that she’d be a PC-pick or usher in the era a “gender-backed dollar,” whatever that means — but this is plenty absurd too. Offensively so. Look, Ben Bernanke was also a soft-spoken academic with no Wall Street experience before he became Fed Chair, but that didn’t stop him managing the financial crisis about as well as anybody could have. (At least the actual panic, not the run-up to it). Did Bernanke, who hired a public speaking coach to help conquer his voice quaver, have gravitas? I don’t know. That judgment probably depends on how much you like his beard.
The idea that Yellen somehow wouldn’t be good in a crisis smacks of sexism. It’s the implicit idea that leadership is shouting down your opponents, and that the markets need an alpha male to tame them. Like I said, it’s bullshit. And it’s bullshit that ignores the most relevant point: Yellen was at the Fed during the crisis. She knows what to do. She was one of the few warning about the shadow banking system right before its crunch turned into a crash that almost ended the financial world as we knew it. I think she could manage just fine in another crisis.
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Matthew Yglesias: Why I Don’t Trust Lawrence Summers’ Friends
The fact that Summers was a bad university administrator doesn’t mean that he’d be a bad Federal Reserve chairman. But it does show that Summers’ friends have a habit of vouching for him when they shouldn’t. Summers turned out to have exactly the flaws Rubin promised the search committee he didn’t have anymore.
Another parallel that strikes me is it was never clear why Summers wanted the Harvard job in the first place. As of 2001 he was an extremely well-regarded economist with no particular background in academic administration or association with any university reform agenda. It just seemed like the most prestigious job he could plausibly get, and so his friends set about to get it for him. Similarly, Summers hasn’t written or spoken extensively on monetary policy in over two decades. It’s telling that when the job of vice chair of the Fed opened up and Yellen was appointed, nobody had considered Summers a contender for the job. If offered, he surely would have declined and regarded the position as beneath his dignity.
But just as it turns out that universities do well to pick leaders with a record of success in academic administration, there’s a lot to be said for picking central bankers to run your central bank. The conceit within the Summers fan club seems to be that the job is presumptively his, and only shrill over-the-top critics have a problem with that. But nobody is entitled to one of the most powerful jobs in America. Summers’ biggest boosters are those who know him well and are blown away by his intelligence. But these same friends have a track record of badly overestimating his suitability for jobs that require other qualities.
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Mark Gongloff: Larry Summers Is Also Bad At Crisis Management
In answer to the question, “Why on earth should Larry Summers be chairman of the Federal Reserve?” his supporters usually allege that he is great in a crisis. Whether you believe that depends on your definition of “great.”
In fact, there is plenty of evidence that Larry Summers is actually kind of terrible in a crisis.
It is true that Summers has been present for more than the normal person’s share of crises. But Dean Baker, of the Center For Economic And Policy Research, a liberal think tank, suggests that Summers is mainly being graded for attendance, rather than performance.
“While it is true that he took a leadership role in dealing with far more crises than Janet Yellen, the other leading contender for the job, it is hard to believe that his record in this area would be a plus if he was being graded by the outcomes,” Baker writes.
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Summers was out of government by the time of the 2001 recession, but his work in the Clinton administration to deregulate the banking sector and fight the regulation of derivatives had already planted the seeds of the next crisis. Unlike Alan Greenspan and some other Clinton-era deregulators, Summers has shown no remorse about his role in creating the crisis. In fact, he has defended the idea of super-sized banks even since. Of course, some of those super-sized banks have paid him very well.
As a top economic adviser to President Obama in 2009, Summers displayed his crisis-fighting acumen by arguing against a large-enough stimulus package, contributing to the sluggish recovery that continues to this day. And he utterly failed to see the crisis coming in the first place, shouting down another economist who suggested in 2005 that one was on the way.
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So, yes, sure, Summers has had a lot of crisis experience. But what good has it done us?
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Paul Krugman: Yellen/Summers and the Twilight of the VSPs
Anyway, it’s also clear that Summers made some pretty big mistakes in his campaign. Neil Irwin points to his silence on monetary policy, which was supposed to be cagey but ended up looking slippery; John Cassidy points to his failure to offer any kind of mea culpa for past errors, which arguably was about preserving gravitas but ends up making him seem unreformed.
But why did Summers make these errors? In part because he is a whip-smart academic, the terror of the seminar room, who likes to play political operator — and as a political operator, he’s a great academic. But there is, I’d argue, a larger issue: Summers did not recognize the extent to which the political world has changed. He’s been carefully cultivating an image as a Very Serious Person, in a world where VSPness has gone from a source of cachet to being a liability on both right and left.
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I suppose Summers might still get the job — but if so, it would be purely because the president is willing to spend a substantial amount of political capital on his behalf. The point is that behavior that was supposed to make Summers a safe choice has actually ended up making him unappealing to both sides.
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