Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : The Obama - Clinton Disaster -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hope Praytochange who wrote (50831)	6/6/2011 12:24:40 PM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 103300

What a Nobel prize won’t get you Posted at 07:45 AM ET, 06/06/2011 Wonkbook: By Ezra Klein washingtonpost.com I'd have thought that once "Nobel laureate" gets added onto your resume, concerns about your qualifications are pretty much over. Apparently not. Economist Peter Diamond got the nod from the Nobel committee last year, but he couldn't get the nod from the Senate GOP to serve on the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors this year. Sen. Richard Shelby, the ranking member on the banking Committee, put his objection pithily. “Does Dr. Diamond have any experience in conducting monetary policy? No. His academic work has been on pensions and labor market theory.” It's not entirely clear what Shelby thinks monetary policy actually does, but over the next couple of decades, managing labor markets and the pressure from pension policy is going be a pretty big part of the Fed's job. On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said that the economy had only created 54,000 jobs in March. If you average out the last three months of job growth, it'll take us 10 years to return to full employment. And if you look beyond 10 years, social insurance programs like Medicare and Social Security will be putting immense stress on the federal budget. By Shelby's admission, Diamond is a world-renowned expert on both topics. If he's what unqualified looks like, I'd love to see qualified. What Shelby can't say is that he's blocking Diamond as payback for a Fed nomination that Bush made in 2007 and Democrats refused to act on until the 2008 election was decided. And that's politics, I guess. But it's remarkable that what Shelby thinks he can say is that Diamond is unqualified because his expertise lies in labor-market analysis. Unemployment is above 9 percent. Almost half of the 15 million workers who're looking for jobs and can't find them have been unemployed for six months or longer. We've got a jobs crisis is this country. And yet Shelby thinks it's self-evident that knowledge about the labor market isn't the sort of expertise that monetary policymakers need right now. If you wanted further evidence that Washington has stopped caring about jobs, there it is.