Stephen Moore isn’t really an economist, but he plays one on TV.
President Trump said Friday he intends to nominate former campaign adviser Stephen Moore to serve on the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors.
Mr. Trump told reporters about his plans after landing in Florida, where he is spending the weekend. Mr. Trump made the offer to Mr. Moore earlier this week, an administration official said.
Stephen Moore was Donald Trump’s economic adviser during the 2016 campaign. A regular Fox News contributor (surprise!), Moore is also a former member of the Wall Street Journal’s pathologically right-wing editorial board, and has multiple associations and memberships with various right-wing think tanks, such as the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation.
Nobel laureate and veteran economist Paul Krugman succinctly describes Moore as an “incompetent hack" who habitually and chronically distorts economic data in order to promote his conservative ideology. Former New Republic columnist Jonathan Chait once described Moore as a “voodoo economist” whose economic articles have actually been banned by the Columbia Journalism Review for their multiple inaccuracies.
As opposed to an actual economist, Moore is described—even on his own Wikipedia page—as a writer and economic policy analyst.
With the trademark self-confidence and bearing of a well-paid know-it-all who actually knows very little, Moore is a fixture of the cable news scene. He has called man-made climate change ”one of the greatest propaganda campaigns in world history," and has described people who accept and understand its reality as “Stalinists."
“I mean, they’ve taken this dingbat idea of global climate change and they’ve put it in the schools, they’ve put it in the movies, they’ve put it in the media and the churches — you know, I’m Catholic, even the Pope talks about climate change.”
“So, it’s very alarming how this propaganda campaign, that they made this stuff out of, almost completely out of thin air and they’ve convinced millions and millions of thought leaders that this stuff is real.”
He also referred to the advent of hydraulic fracturing (fracking) as the “equivalent in health care of a cure for cancer.” He helped craft Trump’s tax plan during the 2016 campaign, and heaped praise on the disastrous tax cuts imposed in Kansas. He is also known for his support of anti-union, so-called right to work laws, such as those inflicted upon Wisconsin workers by former Gov. Scott Walker (h/t to DeSmogBlog for much of the sourcing).
Trump’s nomination of Moore is in keeping with his now-familiar practice of hiring the most incompetent people possible for any given job. Moore’s purpose on the Federal Reserve will be to promote right-wing ideology rather than to implement sound economic policy.
The reaction by the economic community was swift and harsh.
Moore’s nomination coincidentally comes on the same day that the U.S. economy displayed one of the clearest and most reliable signals of a recession looming on the horizon.
One of the most closely watched predictors for recession just sent an alarm signal. It's what investment pros call the "yield curve," and it flipped on Friday for the first time since 2007 during the Great Recession.
That doesn’t necessarily mean a recession is around the corner—yield curve reversals have in the past preceded recessions that occurred from ten months to three years down the road. But with the governance of the Federal Reserve being passed to people like Stephen Moore, it’s a fair bet that whenever the downturn comes, it will be a severe one.