By Dan Kervick
President Obama will soon name a successor to Ben Bernanke for the position of Chair of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, and Brad Delong recently offered his views on what qualifies someone as a strong candidate for that position:
To be good choices for Federal Reserve chair, candidates must pass three tests. They must have experience at a similar job: this is not something to throw somebody into and expect them to swim. They must fear high inflation as they fear a tornado, and feel in their bones the pain of the unemployed. And they must understand and properly weight the different models of how the economy might behave. Right now, this third means that a good Federal Reserve chair must give a relatively high weight to the Keynesian model, which has been so successful at describing and forecasting the economy over the last six years.
