Been an insanely slow day at work, so I decided to learn about who the members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors were. Of the 6 members, 3 have law degrees and a 4th has an honorary LLM. One of the board members has no formal training in finance or economics, although he taught law students in those areas.
Of the 6 board members, there are 2 with some form of Harvard degree, 2 with some form of MIT degree, and 2 with some form of Georgetown degree and of the 3 former faculty members, 2 taught at Harvard and one at MIT.
The intellectual inbreeding at the Federal Reserve is mind numbing. Most--maybe all--of the members have been appointed by Obama, so that probably explains the obsession with lawyers. I'm not sure I understand the validity of a law background on the Fed board. I also noticed that there's not a single, ya know, former banker on the board. It's like they've skipped over that crazy thing called experience. I mean, one might expect a former bank president or CEO to be on the board.
This is nothing new. If you look at the past presidents, almost all were lawyers. The thing that is scary is when people with no training in economics think they are economists. I have seen some banks hiring MBA "economists". What's next? Will we be hiring MBA neurosurgeons because they are good at pitching operations and drugs to the patients?
Yeah, but Presidents are elected. We have the world's most powerful bank board stacked with lawyers and people largely from 3 universities. This grouping of people is a collective embarrassment.
I agree. As bad as it is, at least we don't have MBAs or marketing people running the country.
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The place is a cesspool. Scum begets scum. This is not new.
2.A PhD in economics isn't all that is needed at the Fed. Applied economic POLICY experience is valuable as well. Many times what is economically desirable must be set against political realities (policy experience and connections are more useful in that arena).When you look past the degrees they all have legitimate experience in either policy or economic (many in both).
Are you fucking serious? You can read their publicly posted bios right here:
http://www.federalreserve.gov/aboutthefed/bios/board/default.htm
What kind of idiotic statement is that?
As to their experience, these people were at least 25 before they even started to work in the industry since they spent at least 3 years obtaining a law degree. Presumably many of them practiced some form of law prior to working in the industry. The fact remains that a law degree or background is entirely irrelevant to the position and yet somehow 3 out of 6 members have law degrees. That's not a statistical anomaly--that's definitely statistically significant--it tells me that the person appointing these people has a clear bias toward law degrees, which demonstrates that the person making the appointments doesn't really know the first thing about the Federal Reserve.
Obviously the board members have relevant backgrounds, but if you saw half the members with degrees in engineering you'd say, "Umm, WTF? This makes no sense." And you question why there are 3 board members with engineering degrees in charge of the American banking system.
And on another note, it's a complete embarrassment that there's not a single person on the Board of Governors who comes primarily from the private sector of banking. You have a massive amount of intellectual inbreeding here. This board is an embarrassment.
@DCDepository
"Prior to joining the Administration, he worked as a lawyer and investment banker in New York City." "From 1997 through 2005, Mr. Powell was a partner at The Carlyle Group"
hence my question as to where you were getting your faulty info from.
2.If you don't think policy experience (both domestic and international) is relevant to what the FRB does, then clearly YOU don't know the first thing about the Federal Reserve.
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