Clinton Fail

The Battle of Fed Succession, 1994 Edition by Dean Baker

The current efforts by Larry Summers' acolytes to have him replace Ben Bernanke as Fed Chair reminded me of a past battle. Back in the first term of the Clinton administration it was not assumed that Alan Greenspan had a lifetime position as Fed chair. Some folks thought that the Democratic president might want to take the opportunity to appoint a Democrat as Fed chair. The Vice-Chair at the time, Alan Blinder, was an obvious choice. Blinder had been a highly respected Princeton professor before joining President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers and then moving over to the Fed at the start of 1994. 

Anyhow, Alan Greenspan wanted to head off this possibility. Towards this end, he managed to get a major piece in the NYT over a Blinder scandal. At a speech at the annual meeting of central bankers in Jackson Hole, Blinder suggested that central banks, instead of focusing exclusively on inflation, might actually worry a bit about unemployment (the horrors). Anyhow, the resulting outcry sent Blinder back to Princeton and left Greenspan in charge of the Fed for another decade. 

Ah, the good old days!