Biden prioritizes ‘diversity’ at the Fed while inflation is at a 40-year high and rising
Tiana Lowe
Although some reports claims that President Joe Biden might nominate Austan Goolsbee as the vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre clearly has other ideas. When asked during a press briefing about whether the president is considering “diversity” when considering with whom to replace outgoing Vice Chairwoman Lael Brainard, Jean-Pierre promised that “diversity and representation is really important to this president.”
“The president’s going to look at a highly diverse group of world-class economists just as we did for the previous Fed nominations, so we’re going to continue that process,” Jean-Pierre said.
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“I want to take the opportunity to layout how diverse the president’s Cabinet has been, how diverse the president’s administration has been. The Cabinet is majority people of color for the first time in history. The Cabinet is majority female for the first time in history. A majority of White House senior staff identity as female. Forty percent of White House senior staff identify as part of the racially diverse communities, and a record seven assistants to the president are openly LGBTQ-plus. So again, this is something that the president prides himself on, that he actually has taken action to show the diversity of this administration, and so he will continue not just with this Fed vice chair occupancy but with any occupancy or any position that’s within the White House.”
So, when inflation, which Biden falsely claimed “is coming down,” is actually three times higher than what the Fed considers acceptable — and rising — the White House is outright saying that it wants to use the second-highest Fed position “to show the diversity of this administration.”
Diversity hires haven’t exactly worked out well for this White House thus far. Consider the original diversity hire, Vice President Kamala Harris, who is less popular than Biden, Donald Trump, and even Dick Cheney after he shot a man in the face. Then there are HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra and DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, whom have both faced friendly fire from dismayed Democrats, and in the case of Becerra, public criticism directly from the Oval Office. The most catastrophic self-own was the appointment of “genderfluid” Sam Brinton to the Office of Nuclear Energy. Despite scoring a high-level security clearance, Brinton, the self-described host of “monthly kink parties in their dungeon,” was ultimately terminated after being arrested in connection with his real fetish: allegedly stealing women’s suitcases at airports.
Then, of course, there is Jean-Pierre herself, the unfireable gay black woman whose incompetence has caused the White House press corps to revolt openly.
Biden should look to one of his Democratic predecessors in how to handle the vacancy of Brainard, who will direct his National Economic Council. During the stagflation of the ’70s, Jimmy Carter made the bold and ultimately heroic move to nominate renown monetarist hawk Paul Volcker as Fed chairman, inadvertently at the cost of his own reelection. With inflation at a 40-year high and rising, Biden must prioritize a Fed vice chairperson who will stomach bringing terminal interest rates to north of 5% (or, according to Jamie Dimon, perhaps even 6%) and keeping them there while continuing to destroy our sorely bloated money supply.
The Fed theoretically has a dual mandate, but when inflation breaks the price signals of the entire economy, it really only has one. If Biden wants to conjure up the ghost of Anna Schwartz to replace Brainard for a diversity point, so be it, but nobody should care if his nominee is black, queer, a theyby, or whatever protected class that’s en vogue among liberals these days. The only thing that really matters is that they are a monetarist who takes the mandates and lessons of Paul Volcker seriously.