Obama's Federal Reserve nominees interesting

With the Finance Reform Bill going forward, does anyone else think Obama's latest three appointments, espiecally Peter Diamond and Janet Yellen, to Federal Reserve Board are interesting?

From an article in the Wall Street Journal : "President Barack Obama plans to nominate two economists and a lawyer to the Federal Reserve Board on Thursday, reshaping the central bank's top ranks at a critical period for financial regulation and monetary policy.

"The White House on Thursday will tap Janet Yellen, president of the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank, to be the board's vice chairman, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Peter Diamond and Maryland state banking regulator Sarah Bloom Raskin to sit on the seven-member board, according to people familiar with the mater. The Senate is likely to confirm them."

His nominee Peter Diamond wrote a book in 2005 along with Peter R. Orszag (if that name sounds familiar it's because he's Obama's Director of the Office of Management and Budget and fomer Congressional Budget Office Chief who helped shape the Health Care Reform Bill) Saving Social Security-A Balanced Approach . In the book, they suggest Social Security can be saved by various tax and spend adjustments and gradually ending the process by which the general fund has been borrowing from payroll taxes. According to their book, this requires increased revenues devoted to Social Security. Their plan relies on gradually increasing the retirement age, raising the ceiling on which people must pay FICA (payroll) taxes, and slowly increasing the FICA tax rate to a peak of 15%total from the current 12.4%.

Janet Yellen's main interest, in her own words, has been in "Economic Inequality in the United States."

http://www.frbsf.org/news/speeches/2006/1106.html

Not saying it is a good or bad plan, just interesting that these are the people he's appointing.



http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...rticle_related