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

To: DuckTapeSunroof who wrote (50876)	6/6/2011 12:25:37 PM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Respond to of 103300

When a Nobel Prize Isn’t Enough June 5, 2011 By PETER A. DIAMOND nytimes.com Lexington, Mass. LAST October, I won the Nobel Prize in economics for my work on unemployment and the labor market. But I am unqualified to serve on the board of the Federal Reserve — at least according to the Republican senators who have blocked my nomination. How can this be? The easy answer is to point to shortcomings in our confirmation process and to partisan polarization in Washington. The more troubling answer, though, points to a fundamental misunderstanding: a failure to recognize that analysis of unemployment is crucial to conducting monetary policy. In April 2010, President Obama nominated me to be one of the seven governors of the Fed. He renominated me in September, and again in January, after Senate Republicans blocked a floor vote on my confirmation. When the Senate Banking Committee took up my nomination in July and again in November, three Republican senators voted for me each time. But the third time around, the Republicans on the committee voted in lockstep against my appointment, making it extremely unlikely that the opposition to a full Senate vote can be overcome. It is time for me to withdraw, as I plan to inform the White House. The leading opponent to my appointment, Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, the ranking Republican on the committee, has questioned the relevance of my expertise. “Does Dr. Diamond have any experience in conducting monetary policy? No,” he said in March. “His academic work has been on pensions and labor market theory.” But understanding the labor market — and the process by which workers and jobs come together and separate — is critical to devising an effective monetary policy. The financial crisis has led to continuing high unemployment. The Fed has to properly assess the nature of that unemployment to be able to lower it as much as possible while avoiding inflation. If much of the unemployment is related to the business cycle — caused by a lack of adequate demand — the Fed can act to reduce it without touching off inflation. If instead the unemployment is primarily structural — caused by mismatches between the skills that companies need and the skills that workers have — aggressive Fed action to reduce it could be misguided. In my Nobel acceptance speech in December, I discussed in detail the patterns of hiring in the American economy, and concluded that structural unemployment and issues of mismatch were not important in the slow recovery we have been experiencing, and thus not a reason to stop an accommodative monetary policy — a policy of keeping short-term interest rates exceptionally low and buying Treasury securities to keep long-term rates down. Analysis of the labor market is in fact central to monetary policy. Senator Shelby also questioned my qualifications, asking: “Does Dr. Diamond have any experience in crisis management? No.” In addition to setting monetary policy in light of a proper understanding of unemployment, the Fed is responsible for avoiding banking crises, not just trying to mop up afterward. Among the issues being debated now is how much we should increase capital requirements for banks. Selecting the proper size of the increase requires a balance between reducing the risk of a future crisis and ensuring the effective functioning of financial firms in ordinary times. My experience analyzing the properties of capital markets and how economic risks are and should be shared is directly relevant for designing policies to reduce the risk of future banking crises. Instead of going to the Fed, however, I will go about my congenial professional existence as a professor at M.I.T., where I have taught and researched since 1966, and I will take advantage of some of the many opportunities that come to a Nobel laureate. So don’t worry about me. But we should all worry about how distorted the confirmation process has become, and how little understanding of monetary policy there is among some of those responsible for its Congressional oversight. We need to preserve the independence of the Fed from efforts to politicize monetary policy and to limit the Fed’s ability to regulate financial firms. Concern about the (seemingly low) current risk of future inflation should not erase concern about the large costs of continuing high unemployment. Concern about the distant risk of a genuine inability to handle our national debt should not erase concern about the risk to the economy from too much short-run fiscal tightening. To the public, the Washington debate is often about more versus less — in both spending and regulation. There is too little public awareness of the real consequences of some of these decisions. In reality, we need more spending on some programs and less spending on others, and we need more good regulations and fewer bad ones. Analytical expertise is needed to accomplish this, to make government more effective and efficient. Skilled analytical thinking should not be drowned out by mistaken, ideologically driven views that more is always better or less is always better. I had hoped to bring some of my own expertise and experience to the Fed. Now I hope someone else can. Peter A. Diamond is a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

To: DuckTapeSunroof who wrote (50876)	6/6/2011 9:01:10 PM
From: Hope Praytochange	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 103300

same kind of liberals gave odumba and dumbo algore peace prizes

To: DuckTapeSunroof who wrote (50876)	6/6/2011 9:03:16 PM
From: Hope Praytochange	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 103300

Weiner Says He Sent Photos and Lied, But Won’t Resign By ANDY NEWMAN, DAVID W. CHEN and MICHAEL BARBARO At a news conference in Midtown Monday afternoon, Representative Anthony D. Weiner tearfully confessed to sending a photo of himself in his underwear to a woman via Twitter and then lying about it. Mr. Weiner said the indiscretion was part of a pattern of sending inappropriate and at times explicit photos and messages to women he met over the Internet. Mr. Weiner, 46, a popular and brash Democrat from Queens who has been considering a run for mayor of New York City and is known for aggressive and sometimes intemperate political commentary on Twitter, apologized repeatedly. “I have made terrible mistakes that have hurt the people I care about the most and I’m deeply sorry,” Mr. Weiner said. “I have not been honest with myself, my family, my constituents, my friends and supporters and the media.” He said he had no intention of resigning, that he had broken no laws and that while his wife “made it clear that she thought that what I did was very dumb,” his marriage was not ending. He said he never met any of the women. After Mr. Weiner’s appearance, the House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, called for an ethics investigation of her Democratic colleague to see if he broke any House rules. Mr. Weiner responded that he would “fully cooperate” with it. Mr. Weiner’s speech and question-and-answer session was the culmination (so far) of a drama that began over Memorial Day weekend when the conservative blog BigGovernment.com published a close-up of a man in underwear that appeared to have gone out over Mr. Weiner’s Twitter account to the attention of a woman in Seattle. Mr. Weiner had maintained ever since that he had not sent the photograph, though he said he could not be certain whether he was the person in it.