Ever since President Trump nominated Judy Shelton[1] to the Federal Reserve Board, the economics establishment has been letting Americans know just how crazy she (allegedly) is. And to illustrate that the establishment is bipartisan, the condemnation of Shelton has come from both the left and the right. For example, an American Enterprise Institute fellow has an article in The Hill warning of “Trump’s bizarre Federal Reserve nomination,”[2] while National Review’s resident monetary wonk, Ramesh Ponnuru, wrote in Bloomberg[3] that Shelton not only has a history of pushing very bad policies, but now is apparently flip-flopping just to get the job. And on Twitter, an econ-watcher has a long thread[4] detailing all of the self-evidently nutjob positions Shelton has advanced over the years. Why, she’s not just for the gold standard, but she’s against FDIC! And she thinks the Fed’s 2% (price) inflation target erodes your property rights. Can you imagine?!
And to show that I’m not just cherry-picking, here’s what a Google News search returned for me just now when I typed in “Judy Shelton”—and be sure to read the subheadings as well as the titles:
With this kind of opposition, it won’t surprise you to learn that Shelton has been quite forcefully condemning the whole central bank apparatus. Back in May, when she was being vetted by Trump (but before her actual nomination), Shelton gave an interview to the Financial Times[5] in which she criticized the entire concept of the Federal Reserve:
How can a dozen, slightly less than a dozen, people meeting eight times a year, decide what the cost of capital should be versus some kind of organically, market...