The Best and the Brightest

Kevin Warsh is a 35-year-old Harvard Law graduate. He worked for almost seven years at the investment banking firm Morgan Stanley in lower-level positions involving numerous rote tasks, such as overseeing the production of spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations. Warsh left Morgan Stanley in 2002 as an executive director, the level before one faces the critical sorting-out within the company's hierarchy. In 2002, Warsh married Jane Lauder, heiress to the Estée Lauder cosmetics fortune and daughter of longtime Republican contributor Ron Lauder ($165,000-plus to various Republican committees). That same year, he accepted a job on the staff of Bush's National Economic Council (NEC), where his portfolio included banking and financial market issues. His job there was to communicate the president's wishes throughout the government to all the relevant assistant secretaries in various Cabinet agencies and then synthesize their proposals.

Just another Bushie using his connections to be a part of the Bush Administration? Not by a long shot. In January 2006, President Bush nominated him to be a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Directors. No Ph.D. in Economics. Not only unknown to economists, but apparently not even remembered by officials in the Bush administration who would ostensibly have had contact with him.

Noam Schieber in the March 6, 2006 The New Republic concludes:

If you want to know what happens to an economy without a strong, independent central bank, just take a look at the economic performance of, say, Mexico over the last 30 years and see how you feel about it. Even the heyday of Reagan-era economic quackery didn't produce a Fed nominee as lacking in qualifications or experience as this one. The only way you appoint Kevin Warsh to a seat on the Federal Reserve board is if you have little respect for the practice of economic policy-making and you're not ashamed to admit it. But, then, we already knew that about George W. Bush.