When I was trading, CME had a board. I was not heavily involved in exchange politics. I was involved in pit politics. So, occasionally, you’d interface with exchange board members.
We had a guy on our board named Gordon McClendon. He was a nice fella. Currency broker, not trader. There is a difference. Gordon had to step down from the board because he lied about his vitae on his resume.
I bring this up because we have a Federal Reserve nominee who has been proposed by the Biden Administration. Her name is Lisa Cook. She has taught economics in colleges.
I went to look at what her papers were written on and what her research has been on. None of it was on monetary policy. It’s all been about racial policy. Economist John Cochrane blogged about it here. Here are the papers from her website.
"Segregation and Southern Lynching," with Trevon Logan and John Parman, August 2016.
"The National Lynching Database," Michigan State University, August 2015.
"Bad International Relations but Better Science? The Impact of the Boycott of the Moscow Olympics on International Technological Flows," with Maksym Ivanya, March 2014.
"A Green Light for Red Patents: New Evidence from Soviet Innovation Abroad, 1933 to 1991," 2013.
"The Idea Gap in Pink and Black," with Chaleampong Kongcharoen, NBER Working Paper No. 16331, September 2010.
None of them are relevant to the job she is being nominated for.
Economics can be used as a lens to look at race. Nobel Prize Winner Gary Becker wrote a seminal book on discrimination in 1962. Often people discriminate based on costs/opportunity costs. Becker showed mathematically how Jim Crow laws actually hurt the people that administered and made them economically worse off.
But, race and discrimination aren’t anywhere near the purview of the Federal Reserve.
Not only that, but Professor Cook lied on her resume. The same as my old acquaintance Gordon McClendon. He stepped down but there is no chance she will because her appointment isn’t about ethics, monetary policy, or anything like that. It’s about instituting the same goals that critical race theory and other hard left-wing movements want to bring to the US on a massive scale.
Interestingly, the Supreme Court nominee wasn’t able to answer the question posed to her on the natural rights of man. The only conclusion is that she doesn’t believe in them. When you don’t, your rights stem from the government, not a higher being. You might want to ask people that lived under that system how fair it was. She wasn’t truthful in her answers to questions posed by Senators either.
America will be a weaker country if both of them are successful at being confirmed.