Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Picking Obomber's Brainard

See: Lawrence Summers won’t seek Fed post

Related: Women Will Be Wailing About This Post 

In happiness!

"A top Treasury official may be named for Fed" by Ylan Q. Mui |  Washington Post, September 09, 2013

WASHINGTON — The White House is considering nominating a top female official at the Treasury Department to fill one of the vacant seats at the Federal Reserve, according to two people familiar with the process, amid criticism over the role of women in the Obama administration.

As undersecretary for international affairs, Lael Brainard is one of the most highly ranked — and most visible — female members of President Obama’s economic team. Her name has long been circulated among the insular world of Fed watchers as a potential candidate to sit on the central bank’s influential board of governors.

Her conversations with the administration have been ramped up in recent weeks, and she is seriously considering accepting the nomination, according to the people, who requested anonymity to discuss personnel issues. The White House declined to comment.

Nominating Brainard could help solve a public-relations problem for the White House, which has been assailed over the lack of women in premier posts.

Related: He feels most comfortable with upper middle-class white and Jewish men

That explains everything.

Obama is weighing whether to name Lawrence H. Summers, a close former adviser, to the top job at the Fed — a move that would mean passing over the woman many once considered to be a shoo-in for the position, Janet Yellen, currently the vice chair at the central bank.

That has turned what typically has been an uncontroversial appointment into a political lightning rod.

Because people have finally awoke to how much power the private banking cartel really wields.

The National Organization for Women has decried what it called a ‘‘sexist whispering campaign’’ against Yellen, and 20 Senate Democrats, including key members of the banking committee, sent a letter to the White House urging Obama to appoint her.

Well, it looks like it is down to two ladies now.

Summers also has been dogged by accusations of gender bias after suggesting while he was president of Harvard University in 2005 that women were not as talented as men in math and science, a statement he later called an act of ‘‘spectacular imprudence.’’

Summers the sexist pig!

In addition to naming a new chair for the Fed, Obama must fill as many as four open seats on the central bank’s board. Two of them were held by women: Fed governor Elizabeth Duke resigned at the end of last month, while governor Sarah Bloom Raskin has been nominated as deputy secretary at Treasury.

If Yellen is not nominated for the top job, she is not expected to stay at the Fed. (Another top female official, Cleveland Fed president Sandra Pianalto, retires in January, but her replacement will be selected by the bank’s board.)

Brainard worked under White House economic adviser Gene Sperling when he served in the same role during the Clinton administration. She then moved to the Brookings Institution to work on global development issues, before returning to Treasury in 2010 as the agency’s highest-ranking woman at the time. As the head of the department’s international affairs division, she has been on the front lines of the European crisis, pushing for tough requirements before debt-saddled countries are thrown financial lifelines.

Related: Sunday Globe Special: Making You Think 

She worked for who?

Brainard’s confirmation for her Treasury post in 2010 was delayed by concerns over late payments of property taxes. She was eventually confirmed in a bipartisan vote.

Obama could nominate at least one more woman to the central bank. People familiar with Brainard’s consideration for the Fed said Janice Eberly, a former senior economist at the Treasury and now a professor at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, is also under consideration. But the people were unsure how far the discussions had progressed.

It was also unclear whether the announcements would be made at the same time Obama names his pick to lead the Fed. That decision is expected in the coming weeks, though the escalating turmoil in Syria could delay the timing.

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The problem is NOT who is the chairman (or woman), the problem is the private central banking Federal Reserve System itself!

"Fed’s openness heats up debate over next chief" by Caroline Salas Gage |  Bloomberg News, August 09, 2013

NEW YORK — The unprecedented frenzy surrounding Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke’s potential successor shows that Americans won’t let the central bank go back to its opaque and secretive ways.

The backlash that resulted from Bernanke’s bailouts during the financial crisis and his record expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet has pushed the central bank toward openness at the fastest pace in its 100-year history. His introduction of regular press conferences in 2011 is just one of his recent initiatives.

That scrutiny has persisted as the US economy has struggled to gain momentum and led to an unparalleled public debate over the next chairman, according to Sarah Binder, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington who researches the relationship between the Fed and Congress....

Fed vice chairman Janet Yellen and Lawrence Summers, President Obama’s former top economic adviser, have been the focus of an intensifying public contest for Bernanke’s job. House and Senate Democrats have penned letters to the White House voicing support for Yellen, 66....

Also seeMore than 350 economists back Yellen for Fed chair

While there have been many examples of senators lobbying ‘‘every president since George Washington’’ about appointments, Senate historian Donald A. Ritchie said in an interview that he wasn’t aware of any such campaigns for Fed chief during the prior 14 confirmations.

‘‘In the history of the Fed, there was never anything like this,’’ said Allan Meltzer, a professor of political economy at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business in Pittsburgh and the author of a multivolume history of the central bank....

Bernanke has pursued three rounds of so-called quantitative easing that have swelled the central bank’s balance sheet to a record of more than $3.5 trillion....

That means he loaded all that debt on to the backs of Americans so he could buy back all of Wall Street's crap and boost it's record-setting bottom lines while reducing the dollar's purchasing power for you!

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And now we see that it may not be a women after all, but I guy named Kohn?

RelatedLiberal Democrats putting pressure on Obama

It's an insane economy, folks!