Imagine Trumps economic team in a financial crisis
Last week, for the 10-year anniversary of the Bear Stearns failure, American Public Media’s radio show, “Marketplace,” released an hour-long interview with the key economic policymakers involved: former Federal Reserve chair Ben S. Bernanke, George W. Bush administration treasury secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr., and former New York Federal Reserve president Timothy F. Geithner, who would later become President Barack Obama’s treasury secretary.
Listening to their recounting of the start of the financial crisis, I found myself unexpectedly … wistful.
Not for the ensuing panic, or market crashes, or foreclosures, bankruptcies and layoffs that would lay ruin to millions of innocent bystanders. That was all unequivocally awful. The resulting scars, both economic and political, still have not fully healed.
What I missed was the sense that grown-ups, even if imperfect ones, had once been in charge.
Yes, they made plenty of mistakes. Some mistakes were enormous, and even today remain unacknowledged by the principals themselves, as you can hear in spurts of defensiveness and denial throughout the interview.
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Nevertheless, it was a formidable team. They came from different political parties and professional backgrounds, and yet managed to work together to pull us back from the brink; that is, to prevent the Great Recession from turning into another Great Depression. Bernanke, in particular, was indispensable, given his research on the lessons of the financial collapse of the 1930s.
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And but-for the fact that the presidential candidates in 2008 — Obama and Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona — agreed not to exploit the escalating crisis for political advantage over one another. They released a joint statement shortly after Lehman Brothers collapsed, about the need “to rise above politics for the good of the country.”
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It makes one wonder, and then shudder: What if instead, a decade ago, we had had the political and economic leadership we have in place today?
I’ll reserve judgment on Trump’s choice for Fed chair, Jerome Powell, who has only recently assumed the top job and has so far played his cards close to his chest. But the key members of Trump’s economic brain trust, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and incoming National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow, do not exactly inspire confidence.
http://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/rampell-imagine-trumps-economic-team-in-a-financial-crisis/?utm_source=DAILY+HERALD&utm_campaign=c871d6cb42-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_d81d073bb4-c871d6cb42-228635337
