Trump's Fed picks are awful — but not for the reasons you think

Critics say Trump's nominees threaten the Fed's credibility and independence. But the Fed has been a failure for years.

President Trump, Herman Cain, and Stephen Moore.
(Image credit: Illustrated | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images, Rick Diamond/Getty Images for Helping A Hero, Wikimedia Commons, final09/iStock)

Make no mistake about it: President Trump's latest picks for the Federal Reserve are terrible. A cursory study of Stephen Moore and Herman Cain shows they have no substantive or coherent views on monetary policy; they're simply apparatchiks and yes-men for the current leadership of the Republican Party. It's very likely Cain's nomination will be unsuccessful, thanks in part to resounding rejections from a handful of key Republicans.

Still, it's worth noting that not all arguments against these nominees stand up to scrutiny. The loudest objection suggests that putting Moore and Cain on the Fed would jeopardize the central bank's independence, undermine the Fed's ability to properly stabilize the economy, and threaten to deliver us into a Venezuela-style inflation crisis. This line of thinking assumes that the Fed is one of our last remaining credible, functioning, and non-political institutions. But that's simply not true. Moore and Cain can't ruin the Fed, because the Fed has been a failure for years.

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Jeff Spross

Jeff Spross was the economics and business correspondent at TheWeek.com. He was previously a reporter at ThinkProgress.