The new old hacks..

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Larry Kudlow replaces Cohn.. His track record..

This faith in the power of supply-side tax cuts has gotten him into trouble as a prognosticator on more than a few occasions. As longtime Kudlow critic Jonathan Chait notes, Kudlow was predicting in 1993 that Bill Clinton’s hikes to top rates would preclude an economic recovery. By 2000, when it was clear that hadn’t happened, he was crediting the economic boom to Reagan’s cuts nearly two decades earlier:

In 1993, when Bill Clinton proposed an increase in the top tax rate from 31 percent to 39.6 percent, Kudlow wrote, “There is no question that President Clinton’s across-the-board tax increases … will throw a wet blanket over the recovery and depress the economy’s long-run potential to grow.” This was wrong. Instead, a boom ensued. Rather than question his analysis, Kudlow switched to crediting the results to the great tax-cutter, Ronald Reagan. “The politician most responsible for laying the groundwork for this prosperous era is not Bill Clinton, but Ronald Reagan,” he argued in February, 2000.

He was such a firm believer in George W. Bush’s tax cuts that he was proclaiming as late as December 2007 that “The Bush boom is alive and well.” (That month marked the beginning of the Great Recession.) In July 2008, he proclaimed that the housing market was recovering. Then in 2011, as the economy began recovering under President Obama, Kudlow credited the positive developments to Bush’s tax cuts.

That wasn’t the only policy of Bush’s he preferred. In June 2002, he argued for an invasion of Iraq on the grounds that “the shock therapy of decisive war will elevate the stock market by a couple-thousand points.” The US did invade; the stock market did not rise by thousands of points thereafter.

Larry Kudlow, Trump’s new top economic adviser, explained - Vox

This stuff is simply a joke.

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Kudlow has left a trail behind that's coming back to bite him with predictable regularity..

White House chief economic adviser Larry Kudlow defended the recently passed two-year budget that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says will increase the national debt and deficit even though in 2009 he attacked the Obama administration for doing the same thing.
CNN’s Erin Burnett played Kudlow a clip from 2009 where he criticizes an Obama budget for the deficits and debt it created. “The families of America take a look at this budget and these humongous deficits and the doubling of the debt and so forth and the out of control spending….this is the most unbalanced fiscal story coming out of Washington, really in our history,” Kudlow said in 2009.

Burnett pointed out that in 2009, CBO said the national debt would reach 68 percent of the gross domestic product by 2019. Today, the CBO said that the national debt would reach 105 percent of GDP by the end of 2028. Kudlow told Burnett that the Trump administration doesn’t believe the CBO’s projection that the GOP tax cuts and spending bill will increase the national debt. He added that his issue with the Obama program was that “it was all spending,” mainly for welfare programs and social spending that he didn’t think would lead to growth. When Burnett pushed back by saying that President Trump recently signed a spending bill that will sharply increase the deficit, Kudlow said that Trump’s spending bill was “nothing like the Obama stimulus package.””

Kudlow confronted over attacks on Obama deficit after rejecting CBO's projections on Trump budget | TheHill

Of course it's mostly nonsense:

• In 2009, the economy was in deep recession. Apart from the recession itself blowing up the deficit, it's the right time for stimulus, as the private sector was repairing balance sheets, therefore saving more and spending less.
  
• The 2009 stimulus program wasn't all spending, it also contained one of the biggest tax cuts in US history.
  
• But spending was really required in 2009, especially on lower incomes because significant parts of the tax cuts were likely saved (to repair balance sheets as asset values dropped steeply whilst debts remained) and spending stimulates the economy dollar for dollar in such a situation.
  

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From Think Progress, Larry Kudlow's funny track record:

Larry Kudlow has made some astoundingly bad predictions, even for a CNBC pundit

RYAN KORONOWSKI MAR 14, 2018, 4:34 PM

Larry Kudlow is President Donald Trump’s choice to replace Gary Cohn as director of the National Economic Council (NEC). Cohn spent over 25 years at Goldman Sachs, and was president and COO for ten years before he joined the Trump administration. Past NEC directors have had law degrees from Yale or Harvard or Cornell, MBAs from Harvard or Wharton (not a bachelor’s with an economics major ), a Ph. D in economics from Harvard or MIT, decades of business experience, or taught at the London School of Economics, Kudlow has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Rochester and did not complete a master’s degree in economics at Princeton. He has worked at a junior level at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and also in the Reagan Office of Management and Budget. He worked at Bear Stearns from 1987 to 1994, until he was fired for cocaine abuse. After working for Arthur Laffer’s firm, he got into journalism, most notably hosting a business show on CNBC.

He also has a penchant for making wildly incorrect predictions and assurances about the economy. Here are a few:

Kudlow recommended buying stocks in September 2008
He wrote, in an article that is still on the internet, that investors should buy stocks on September 3, 2008.
“Undoubtedly, more credit problems will surface among the banks,” Kudlow said. “But that’s looking through the rearview mirror. For those of us who prefer to look ahead, through the windshield, the outlook for stocks is getting better and better.”
The stock market crashed on September 29, 2008, taking with it $1.2 trillion in wealth. The recovery would take years.

Kudlow said invading Iraq in 2002 would boost the economy
During the run-up to the Iraq War, Kudlow was an unabashed hawk, but not just for the reasons the Bush administration was giving the public. In June 2002, Kudlow wrote that a “small war” would be a huge boon for the American economy. He recommended first taking Iraqi oil fields, and then a “final assault” on Baghdad. He did not discuss what would happen to Iraq or to American troops in Iraq after the invasion.

Decisive shock therapy to revive the American spirit would surely come with a U.S. invasion of Iraq. Why not begin with a large-scale special-forces commando raid on the Iraqi oil fields? This will send a shot across Saddam’s bow; an electrifying signal to all terrorist nations. The message will be that the game is up. Surrender now or you will be crushed in a short while.
Meanwhile, Saddam’s cash flow can be cut off. Oil is his only crop, his single manufacture. Without money there will be nothing left to steal, and nothing to use to pay off his cronies.
A couple of weeks later a final assault on Baghdad can take place. A small war, to use Wall Street Journal editorialist Max Boot’s lexicon, led by fast-moving special forces and leather-toughened Marines, and assisted by high-tech precision bombs and air cover, can get the job done. All-out war mobilization is unnecessary. Iraq will fall with much less. At the same time, U.S. special forces must conduct a similar sweep to root out the bin Ladens and al Qaedas along the Pakistani/Afghan border.

Kudlow concluded with a prediction that the stock market will rise and that “our businesses will stay open.”

The shock therapy of decisive war will elevate the stock market by a couple-thousand points. We will know that our businesses will stay open, that our families will be safe, and that our future will be unlimited. The world will be righted in this life-and-death struggle to preserve our values and our civilization. But to do all this, we must act.

The war has cost over a trillion dollars, and tens of thousands of lives. Small businesses were seriously impacted by National Guard call-ups. Countless veterans and civilians suffer physical and mental injuries. It destabilized the Middle East, fueling ongoing conflicts in Syria and Lebanon, the rise of ISIS, and it distracted focus from U.S. efforts in Afghanistan.
Kudlow, before becoming a Reagan conservative, was an active anti-war protesterin the 1970s.

Kudlow denied the existence of the housing bubble in 2005
In an article published by the National Review in June 2005, Kudlow referred to people who were concerned about the housing bubble as “bubbleheads” and said they “haven’t done their homework.” He argued that the “bubbleheads who expect housing-price crashes in Las Vegas or Naples, Florida, to bring down the consumer, the rest of the economy, and the entire stock market,” are “dead wrong.”
The housing market began to fall apart in earnest two years later, and in 2008 caused the entire global economy to collapse into The Great Recession.
Kudlow lauded the “Bush Boom” on the eve of the Great Recession and ridiculed “pessimistas”
Here are some things that Larry Kudlow wrote in one single article in December 2007:

• “There’s no recession coming. The pessimistas were wrong. It’s not going to happen.”
  
• “The pessimistas are a persistent bunch. In 2006, they were certain a recession was just around the corner. They were wrong.”
  
• “I believe the economic pendulum will soon swing in favor of the GOP.”
  
• “The Bush boom is alive and well. It’s finishing up its sixth consecutive year with more to come. Yes, it’s still the greatest story never told.”
  

In another post in December, he concluded, “There ain’t no recession.”
The Great Recession started in December 2007.

Kudlow dismissed the seriousness of the Great Recession in February 2008
After denying that there would be a recession three months earlier, Kudlow opinedin February 2008 that “there’s no need to press the panic button.” He assured his readers that “no matter what the signal was today, I’m going to bet that the economy will be rebounding sometime this summer, if not sooner. We are in a slow patch. That’s all. It’s nothing to get up in arms about.”
The Great Recession lasted until June 2009, the longest since World War II. GDP fell 4.3 percent, and unemployment doubled.
In July 2008, Kudlow said it was a “mental recession, not an actual recession”
In an article titled, “If things are so bad…” Kudlow gathered a few loose strands of possible good news in the face of an avalanche of evidence of catastrophe, just before the global economy started to collapse. Kudlow wasn’t buying it. “We are in a mental recession, not an actual recession,” he wrote.
“And the low-tax, free-trade, free-market, capitalist economy is a whole lot more resilient and durable than the pessimistas and declinists would have us believe,” Kudlow said.

Kudlow thought the housing market hit bottom in July 2008
In an article which talked about another bad report on U.S. housing stock, Kudlow pointed out the silver lining, which he said wasn’t getting enough attention.
“But inside the report was an awful lot of very good new news, which appear to be pointing to a bottom in the housing problem; in fact, maybe the tiniest beginnings of a recovery,” he said.
“It’s a pity the mainstream media keeps searching for more and more pessimism. The reality is a possible upturn in the housing trend, and at the very least we are getting a bottom.”
The housing market had much much farther to fall.
 
Kudlow cheered on Wall Street CEOs using bailout money to fun private jet trips
In a 2009 interview, Kudlow downplayed reports of Wall Street CEOs using taxpayer bailout money to fund private jet trips. “I think it’s great because I want to stimulate the economy,” Kudlow said. “I want to help the resorts. … I’m glad the CEOs are going around. I just wish they’d take me with them.”

Kudlow called Occupy Wall Street demonstrators “anti-American” but said the Tea Party was great for the economy
In a 2010 CNBC clip, Kudlow can be seen describing protesters organizing on Wall Street as “bizarre” and “anti-American.”
Meanwhile, a year later, Kudlow credited the “emergence of Tea Party free-market populism” as “hugely bullish for stocks and the economy in 2011.”
One place where Tea Party economics got a trial run is the state of Kansas, which is an experiment that blew up in former Gov. Sam Brownback’s face.

Kudlow imagined Obama’s economic policy would yield high inflation rates
Kudlow wrote several articles, starting in 2009, lamenting the new Obama administration’s impact on inflation rates, even though inflation rates in 2009 were quite low. Over both Obama terms, inflation rates remained historically low — lower than any other modern presidential term.

Kudlow said unemployment benefits make people not want to work
In 2015, Kudlow appeared on Glenn Beck’s show and said he thought that unemployment assistance made people not want to work. This is not true.
“Trouble is, our government down through the years, under both Republicans and Democrats, has created a whole series of incentives not to work,” he said. “This is what I find very troubling: they’re going to pay you not to work.” He then extended the metaphor to Obamacare benefits.
Kudlow also recently admitted that he has “virtually no knowledge” in the field of issues that affect families grappling with poverty, although he did still take the opportunity to lecture single parents about how they are to blame.

Kudlow defending Trump staff picks arguing that “wealthy folks” don’t have to “engage in corruption”
Lauding president-elect Trump’s transition staffing picks, Kudlow made that case that rich people were great choices to join the Trump administration because they “have no need to steal.”

Why shouldn’t the president surround himself with successful people? Wealthy folks have no need to steal or engage in corruption. Their business success demonstrates that they know how to achieve goals and convince skeptics that good deals can be made to the benefit of both sides. Isn’t this just what America needs?

The Trump administration has been marked by a high turnover rate, and many staff have left for issues related to corruption, while many who have remained have faced scrutiny for expensive taxpayer funded private flights, trips, doors, and dining room tables, to name a few.

Kudlow said he could fix the economy by sitting down with Glenn Beck for a half hour
“I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: you and I and like-minded people who believe in freedom — I can sit down with you and fix the economy,” he told Glenn Beck while appearing on Beck’s program. “Give me a half hour. … I’ve been doing it for close to 40 years. The principles don’t change.”
It’s unclear whether Kudlow and Beck sat down to work on a plan, but he will be sitting down regularly with President Trump.

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Kudlow, mind you, was not educated as an economist. In fact, he doesn’t have an advanced degree at all (though none of that kept him from landing chief economist jobs at Paine Webber and Bear Stearns). But what he lacks in credentials he makes up for in certitude. As Jonathan Chait chronicles in “The Big Con,” his takedown of supply-side economics, in 1993, Kudlow confidently predicted that Bill Clinton’s tax hikes would throw “a wet blanket over the recovery.” Instead, the economy boomed. In December of 2007, Kudlow wished away the economic warning signs on the horizon. “The recession debate is over,” he wrote. “It’s not gonna happen.””

Larry Kudlow’s specious supply-side tax cut claim - The Boston Globe

That Jonathan Chait link looks at Kudlows comical prediction history, which is really quite something..

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Stephen Moore at it again..

Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell busted Trump-loving economist Stephen Moore on Friday when he falsely claimed that we are seeing vast “deflation” in the United States economy thanks to interest rate hikes by the Federal Reserve. During a CNN appearance, Moore tried to maintain that the economy was as strong as ever, but he also blamed the Fed for tanking the stock market by raising interest ratesover the past several months. “Both of the rate hikes were unnecessary and were a cause for deflation in the economy,” he said. “Wait, wait, wait!” interjected Rampell. “There is no deflation!” “Yeah there is,” Moore replied. “No there is not,” she shot back. “Look at the Consumer Price Index!” Moore tried to counter by noting that some prices on the Commodities Price Index had dropped — but Rampell hit back by saying that much of that was due to President Donald Trump’s trade wars. “Soy bean prices are falling because of the trade war,” she said.

Rampell then nailed Moore for his false warnings during the Obama presidency that it was unwise for the Fed to keep interest rates low because it would lead to hyperinflation — despite the fact that the economy at the time was deeply depressed and much more in need of easy money. “I’m old enough to remember when, ten years ago, during an actual deflation, you went on TV on a rival network and said we were about to have hyperinflation and told the Fed that it was irresponsible then to keep rates low,” she said. “It’s totally inconsistent and it’s totally irresponsible to make up numbers.” “I’m not making up numbers,” Moore replied defensively.

BUSTED: Trump loyalist called out in real time on CNN for ‘making up numbers’ to support president’s economic agenda – Alternet.org

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And another hack, now nominated to head the World Bank by the Trump administration:

Malpass is, as Sandefur suggests, an infamously bad economic forecaster. As my colleague Matt Yglesias noted upon Malpass’s initial appointment to the Trump administration, Malpass served as chief economist to Bear Stearns in 2007 and 2008 as the firm collapsed due to the subprime crisis. In August 2007, he wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed titled, “Don’t Panic About the Credit Market,” in which he argued, “Neither the economy nor job growth has been dependent on housing.” He also wrote that “buyers, and likely the economy as a whole, will probably benefit over time from the wrenching return to more normal market conditions.” Within months of the op-ed’s publication, the US was in a recession. By March 2008, Bear Stearns had to be bailed out by the New York Fed and JPMorgan Chase. 

Undeterred, Malpass spent the Obama years calling for the Fed to adopt higher interest rates, and in 2012 even argued that maintaining low rates would lead to a recession. The Fed kept rates low, a recession didn’t ensue, and most economists credit the steady recovery to the Fed’s willingness to maintain rates near zero. If anything, it erred in not trying hard enough to push long-term interest rates down..

David Malpass’s World Bank nomination, explained - Vox

There is lots more in the article, amazing stuff..

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Another old hack, this one is now nominated for heading the World Bank. Incredible..

From Uneasy Money

There They Go Again (And Now They’re Back!)
Published February 5, 2019 David Malpass , monetary policy , Wall Street Journal34 Comments 
Tags: David Malpass

Note: On August 5, 2011, one month after I started blogging, I wrote the following post responding to an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by David Malpass, an op-ed remarkable for its garbled syntax, analytical incoherence, and factual misrepresentations. All in all, quite a performance. Today, exactly seven and a half years later, we learn that the estimable Mr. Malpass, currently serving as Undersecretary for International Affairs in the U.S. Treasury Department, is about to be nominated to become the next President of the World Bank.

In today’s Wall Street Journal, David Malpass, who, according to the bio, used to be a deputy assistant undersecretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration, and is now President of something called Encima Global LLC (his position as Chief Economist at Bear Stearns was somehow omitted) carries on about the terrible damage inflicted by the Fed on the American economy.

The U.S. is practically alone in the world in pursuing a near-zero interest rate and letting its central bank leverage to the hilt to buy up the national debt. By choosing to pay savers nearly nothing, the Fed’s policy discourages thrift and is directly connected to the weakness in personal income.

Where Mr. Malpass gets his information, I haven’t a clue, but looking at the table of financial and trade statistics on the back page of the July 16 edition of the Economist, I see that in addition to the United States, Japan, Switzerland, Hong Kong, and Singapore, had 3-month rates less than 0.5%.  Britain, Canada, and Saudi Arabia had rates between 0.5 and 1%. The official rate of the Swedish Riksbank is now 2.5%, but it held the rate at 0.5% until economic conditions improved.

As for Malpass’s next sentence, where to begin?  I won’t dwell on the garbled syntax, but, even if that were its intention, the Fed is obviously not succeeding in discouraging thrift, as private indebtedness has been falling consistently over the past three years.  The question is whether it would be good for the economy if people were saving even more than they are now, and the answer to that, clearly, is:  not unless there was a great deal more demand by private business to invest than there is now.  Why is business not investing?  Despite repeated declamations about the regulatory overkill and anti-business rhetoric of the Obama administration, no serious observer doubts that the main obstacle to increased business investment is that expected demand does not warrant investments aimed at increasing capacity when existing capacity is not being fully utilized.  And for the life of me I cannot tell what it is that Mr. Malpass thinks is connected to the weakness in personal income.  Nor am I am so sure that I know what “weakness in personal income” even means.

From here Malpass meanders into the main theme of his tirade which is how terrible it is that we have a weak dollar.

One of the fastest, most decisive ways to restart U.S. private-sector job growth would be to end the Fed’s near-zero interest rate and the Bush-Obama weak-dollar policy. As Presidents Reagan and Clinton showed, sound money is a core growth strategy—the fastest and most effective way to tell world capital that the U.S. is back in business.

Mr. Malpass served in the Reagan administration, so I would have expected him to know something about what happened in that administration.  Obviously, my expectations were too high.  According to the Federal Reserve’s index of trade weighted dollar exchange rate, the dollar exchange rate stood at 95.66 when Reagan took office in January 1981 and at 90.82 when Reagan left office 8 years later.  Now it is true that the dollar rose rapidly in Reagan’s first term reaching about 141 in May 1985, but it fell even faster for the remainder of Reagan’s second term.  So what exactly is the lesson that Mr. Malpass thinks that the Reagan administration taught us?  Certainly the reduction in dollar exchange rate in Reagan’s second term was much greater than the reduction in the exchange rate so far under Mr. Obama, from about 83 to 68.

Then going in for the kill, Mr. Malpass warns us not to repeat Japan’s mistakes.

Only Japan, after the bursting of its real-estate bubble in 1990, has tried anything similar to U.S. policy. For close to a decade, Tokyo pursued a policy of amped-up government spending, high tax rates, zero-interest rates and mega-trillion yen central-bank buying of government debt. The weak recovery became a deep malaise, with Japan’s own monetary officials warning the U.S. not to follow their lead.

Funny, Mr. Malpass seems to forget that Japan also pursued the sound money policy that he extols.  Consider the foreign exchange value of the yen.   In April 1990, the yen stood at 159 to the dollar.  Last week it was at 77 to the dollar.  Sounds like a strong yen policy to me.  Is that the example Mr. Malpass wants us to follow?

Actually the Wall Street Journal in its editorial today summed up its approach to economic policy making rather well.

The Keynesians have fired all their ammo, and here we are, going south.  Maybe now President Obama should consider everything he’s done to revive the American economy — and do the opposite.

That’s what it comes down to for the Journal.  If Obama is for it, we’re against it.  Simple as that.  Leave your brain at the door.

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In December 2015, the right-wing commentator Stephen Moore, US President Donald Trump’s pick to fill a vacancy on the US Federal Reserve Board of Governors, savagely attacked then-Fed Chair Janet Yellen and her predecessor, Ben Bernanke, for maintaining loose monetary policies in the years following the “Great Recession.” According to Moore, who is not a professional economist, investors had “become hyper-dependent” on the Fed’s “zero-interest-rate policy … just as an addict craves crack cocaine.” This “money creation,” he surmised, had yielded “nada” in terms of “helping juice the economy, creating jobs, or giving the American worker a pay raise.” Worse, the United States had already “tried this before – twice – and both times the story ended badly with a pop of the bubble … in 1999-2000 and ... in 2008-09.” The lesson, he concluded, is that, “Micromanaging the economy through the lever of money creation at the grand fiefdom within the Fed doesn’t work.”

Or does it? Moore himself is probably not the most reliable judge. On December 26, 2018, he savagely attacked Yellen’s successor, Jerome Powell, for raising interest rates to unwind the very approach that he had condemned three years earlier. “If you cut engine power too far on a jetliner,” he warned, “it will stall and drop out of the sky.” Moore complained that after having “risen by 382 points on hopes that the Fed would listen to Trump and stop cutting power,” the Dow Jones Industrial Average had “plunged by 895 points” on the news of another interest-rate hike. This, he concluded, was evidence that “the Fed’s monetary policy has come unhinged.” Moore called on Powell to “do the honorable thing … and resign.” But, failing that, he hoped that Trump would simply fire the Fed chair. “The law says he can replace the Federal Reserve Chairman for cause,” Moore observed in an interview that same week. “Well, the cause is that he’s wrecking our economy.” If Moore’s approach to legal reasoning seems deficient, one must wonder how he would approach monetary policymaking. Judging by his own statements, a three-month Treasury rate of 0.26% driving a ten-year rate of 2.3% was far too low in December 2015, whereas a three-month rate of 2.42% driving a ten-year rate of 2.55% is far too high today.

The Fed Board Unmoored by J. Bradford DeLong - Project Syndicate

• So loose monetary policy in the aftermath of the biggest crisis in 8 decades gets savage criticism and the Fed shouldn't even try to regulate the economy.
  
• But small tightening in a (in Moore's words) booming economy is.. equally criticized savagely and reason to fire the Fed chief.
  
• He actually argued that the loose monetary policy post financial crisis would create runaway inflation.
  

Is there a more shameless opportunist than Steven Moore?

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It's not that we're interested in the details of personal life (nobody's perfect), it's the hypocrisy of it all.. From The Guardian:

Trump Fed pick was held in contempt for failing to pay ex-wife over $300,000
Records obtained by Guardian show Stephen Moore reprimanded by judge for not paying alimony, child support and other debts

Jon Swaine in New York and David Smith in Washington
Sat 30 Mar 2019 14.47 GMTLast modified on Sat 30 Mar 2019 19.20 GMT

Stephen Moore, the economics commentator chosen by Donald Trump for a seat on the Federal Reserve board, was found in contempt of court after failing to pay his ex-wife hundreds of thousands of dollars in alimony, child support and other debts.

Court records in Virginia obtained by the Guardian show Moore, 59, was reprimanded by a judge in November 2012 for failing to pay Allison Moore more than $300,000 in spousal support, child support and money owed under their divorce settlement. Moore continued failing to pay, according to the court filings, prompting the judge to order the sale of his house to satisfy the debt in 2013. But this process was halted by his ex-wife after Moore paid her about two-thirds of what he owed, the filings say. In a divorce filing in August 2010, Moore was accused of inflicting “emotional and psychological abuse” on his ex-wife during their 20-year marriage. Allison Moore said in the filing she had been forced to flee their home to protect herself. She was granted a divorce in May 2011. Moore said in a court filing signed in April 2011 he admitted all the allegations in Allison Moore’s divorce complaint. He declined to comment for this article.

Allison Moore declined to comment during a brief telephone discussion this week. A person close to the Moores said they now had a better relationship and that Allison Moore had a more favourable view of their marriage. Trump has been criticised for selecting Moore for an influential job at the world’s most powerful central bank. A former economics writer for the Wall Street Journal who has held positions at several conservative thinktanks, Moore was an adviser to Trump’s 2016 campaign and has championed the president on cable television. Greg Mankiw, an economics professor at Harvard University who was a senior economic adviser to former president George W Bush, has said Moore “does not have the intellectual gravitas” for the job and urged senators to reject him.

The Guardian revealed this week that Moore owes the US government $75,000 according to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Moore disputes the government’s claim and blames confusion over tax deductions relating to his child support and alimony payments. Moore has lamented the steady decline in US marriage numbers, asserting in an October 2014 article that “intact families” were important for the economy and criticising “those who cheer divorce as a form of women’s liberation”. Concluding the article, he called for a “personal and national commitment to sturdy families” and strong parenting as part of a “culture of virtue” aimed at saving the American economy from what he called a path of decline.

Moore’s 2018 book Trumponomics, co-authored with the veteran economist Arthur Laffer, said many Americans felt “a sense of not being loved (tied to divorce and family breakup)” and argued this was one reason people should be required to work to receive money from government assistance programs.
He has frequently derided the views of the American left on cultural issues, claiming in a 2015 article published by the Christian Broadcasting Network that to liberals “if you support traditional marriage, you are a fascist”.

The 2010 divorce filing from Moore’s wife said he had destroyed their marriage through adultery, after creating two accounts on the dating website Match.com and beginning an affair with a woman early in 2010. Moore is said to have discussed the affair “openly and tastelessly” with his then wife, and to have said at one point: “I have two women, and what’s really bad is when they fight over you.” He also left evidence of the relationship around the home, the filing said. Allison Moore said in the filing she had been a “good and dutiful wife” and quit her job to raise the couple’s three children, only to suffer infidelity and poor treatment from her husband.

Last week the Guardian reported that Moore created a controversial political attack group during the 2008 presidential election campaign with his friend Paul Erickson, a veteran Republican operative. Erickson has been indicted on federal charges of money laundering and tax fraud, to which he has pleaded not guilty. His girlfriend, the Russian pro-gun activist Maria Butina, pleaded guilty to working as a Russian agent by trying to infiltrate the conservative political movement in the US. She is due to be sentenced next month.

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More on Moore..

but Moore is probably the only person who went from arguing that the Fed needed to raise rates when Obama was president because inflation was “really” higher than the official numbers said it was to now saying it needs to cut them since, you guessed it, inflation is supposedly lower than the government would lead you to believe. In both cases, Moore simply cherry-picked prices that were, respectively, either rising faster or slower than the average, as if that proved the average was wrong, rather than he just does not seem to understand how averages work. The almost too-perfect result is that Moore was warning about hyperinflation  when we had deflation under Obama, and about deflation when we had relatively normal inflation under Trump.

It is how someone who used to say “zero interest rates haven’t helped the economy” when we had a president he did not like could now be so opposed to any rate increases that he thought Fed Chair Jerome H. Powell should have been fired for the last one. But, as bad as that is, it might not even be Moore’s worst idea about monetary policy. No, that is the fact he thinks the Fed should primarily seek to stabilize commodity prices — things like gold, oil and soybeans — rather than overall prices. What is so wrong with that? Well, both because their prices are set in world markets and their supply can be subject to pretty wild swings, say, from a civil war taking Libya’s oil production offline, or the shale revolution unlocking new sources of crude, commodity prices tend to bounce around a lot in a way that does not always tell us much about the state of the economy.

Stephen Moore would change the Federal Reserve for the worse — much worse - The Washington Post