Desmond Lachman writes about the Fed chairman:
Jerome Powell risks going down in history as the Federal Reserve’s worst chairman since Arthur Burns, who brought us runaway inflation in the 1970s.
He risks doing so by first having kept monetary policy too loose for too long as he waited for clear signs of inflation to actually show up in the data. He thereby lost control over inflation and added to an asset-price bubble. He now risks allowing the same data-driven approach to cause him to slam on the monetary-policy brakes too hard to regain control over inflation even at the likely cost of a deep recession.
Stephen Moore writes about the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission chairman:
With gas prices running at nearly $4.50 a gallon — almost $2 a gallon higher than when President Trump left office — soaring electric-utility costs for homeowners and businesses, and the threat of blackouts and brownouts in as many as a dozen states, the last thing America needs is a green zealot running the federal agency overseeing American energy policy. But in tapping Richard Glick for a second term to head the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), President Biden has doubled down on his crusade to eliminate oil, gas, and coal from America’s energy supply.
Glick’s first 18 months at the head of FERC have been catastrophically bad. He has presided over the biggest increase in energy costs in 40 years; his regulatory assault has led to scuttling pipelines and other urgently needed energy-security infrastructure; and his green-policy directives against coal and natural gas and in favor of expensive and unreliable renewable energy have put the nation at risk of energy shortages and power-grid vulnerability.
Renominating Glick (originally a Trump appointee) is tantamount to rehiring an NFL coach to a four-year contract extension after the football team went 2–15.
On this week’s episode of the Capital Record, David interviews Sachin Khajuria, author of a new book on private-equity markets. Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts.