Roy Cordato warned us that President Obama?s decision to reappoint Ben Bernanke as Federal Reserve chairman represented a case of ?George W. Bush on steroids.?
Another economist who?s no fan of Bernanke?s work as Fed chairman is Stanford Professor John B. Taylor, dubbed ?The GOP?s Shadow Fed Chairman? in a new Bloomberg Businessweek profile.
It’s not just the Fed’s easy-money policy that gets Taylor typing furiously. He’s also critical of the Dodd-Frank financial regulatory overhaul and former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan’s monetary calls. Taylor claims that had Greenspan followed his monetary policy formula, called (what else?) the Taylor Rule, interest rates from 2002 to 2005 would have been higher, preventing the housing bubble and bust and the unemployment that followed. Greenspan counters that Taylor has made “a number of inaccurate connections” about his record.
Taylor also decries Obama’s $814 billion economic stimulus package, saying it neither boosted the economy nor lowered unemployment. States mostly used the funds to reduce their level of borrowing, he says, rather than to increase spending.
