FEDERAL RESERVE/NOMINATIONS/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “President Trump on Wednesday [11-29-17] nominated Marvin Goodfriend, a leading critic of the Federal Reserve’s actions since the 2008 financial crisis, to serve on the Fed’s board of governors.
The choice of Mr. Goodfriend, a professor of economics at Carnegie Mellon University, is a victory for conservatives who want to reshape the Fed’s approach to monetary policy. Mr. Goodfriend has long argued that the Fed should focus on controlling inflation using a minimalist set of tools.
The selection comes after Mr. Trump chose a moderate Republican, Jerome H. Powell, as the Fed’s next chairman. There are still three vacancies on the board, and Mr. Trump’s nominees will determine how fast the Fed raises interest rates, and how forcefully it responds to future downturns.
Mr. Goodfriend, 67, spent more than 20 years as an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, a stronghold of conservative monetary theory, rising to the position of chief monetary policy adviser. He left the bank in 2005 to join the faculty at Carnegie Mellon.
In recent years, he has sharply criticized the Fed’s methods and its goals. As Fed officials sought to revive the economy and drive down unemployment by mounting a large-scale stimulus campaign, Mr. Goodfriend repeatedly cautioned that the Fed was courting higher inflation.”
-Binyamin Appelbaum, “Trump Nominates Conservative Economist for Fed Board,” The New York Times online, Nov. 29, 2017