JD FOSTER: The Fed Lags Again As Bessent Seeks An Open Minded Successor

With the focus on the Federal Reserve cutting the funds rate again on Wednesday, we’re reminded of Chair Jay Powell’s Trumpian sobriquet of “too late Jay,” that he exits in May, and that Treasury Secretary Bessent is actively vetting his replacement. Amen.

Bessent says he seeks an individual with an open mind, which is great, but a second essential is having a well-grounded monetary philosophy. It’s not enough to be on Trump’s team. It’s not enough to be well-spoken and a “good guy.” The Fed Chair really has to know his or her stuff.

Having an open mind should mean accepting that neither the new Fed chair, nor the Fed Board, nor the consensus counsel of the Fed’s group-think economists fully understand how the economy works much of the time.

Newsflash: Economists don’t know everything, and much of what the consensus thinks it knows is wrong.

We’re not talking about the micro foundations of economics, which are rock solid. We’re talking about the macro economy and the operation of monetary policy.

Want proof? Remember the consensus view regarding Biden’s temporary inflation? Remember the confident consensus predictions of recession when the Fed awoke to the soaring inflation problem? Remember the consensus that President Trump’s tariffs would reignite inflation and cause a recession? Wrong, wrong, wrong.

A Fed chair needs many talents to succeed. In addition to an open mind, he or she needs executive ability as they are also the de facto CEO of an enormous institution.

The next chair should firmly believe the Fed has become foolishly enmeshed in tangential matters and should return to its core mission of setting proper financial conditions to meet the dual mandate of low unemployment and low and stable inflation.

A successful Fed chair also needs enormous patience as they have to appear before Congress and listen to members ask horrifically stupid questions. Though sorely tempted, the Fed Chair cannot in response simply quote the famous line from the original Saturday Night Live – “Jane, you ignorant slut.”

But a successful Fed chair also needs a sound grounding in what we know to be true about the economy. Their mind should not be open to nonsense, and the Chair should be strong enough to resist consensus pressures.

For example, the next Fed chair should understand that higher tariffs are not inflationary. To be sure, they will cause some goods’ prices to rise faster than otherwise. But such relative price changes are commonplace. Some prices rise faster while some prices more slowly or even fall. Inflation is the rise in the overall price level, not the rise of some subset of prices.

Also, the next Fed chair should grasp that economic growth is more likely to be deflationary than inflationary. Conventional wisdom holds there’s something called a Phillips Curve that depicts an inverse relationship between the unemployment rate and the inflation rate. According to the Curve, faster growth and lower unemployment lead to faster inflation.

The Phillips curve is wonderfully intuitive and tremendously useful in economic models. But it’s been proven wrong, time and again, which likewise provides at least a partial explanation why the models relying on the Curve are so often wrong.

Bessent’s preferred candidate will need to be patient and demonstrate executive skills, but above all the next Fed chief will need the modesty to maintain an open mind and the training to afford a sufficient grasp of the macroeconomy to know and never forget that inflation is ultimately and solely a monetary phenomenon.

J.D. Foster is the former chief economist at the Office of Management and Budget and former chief economist and senior vice president at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He now resides in relative freedom in the hills of Idaho.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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