President Donald Trump announced Tuesday that he plans to nominate his economic adviser Judy Shelton to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.
Shelton, who was on the board of directors of Hilton Hotels, represents Trump’s third try to get one of his people into one of the two empty slots on the all-white Fed Board after Herman Cain and Steve Moore both pulled out due to establishment criticism including from Willard “Mitt” Romney. Economist Christopher Waller is also set to be nominated.
Shelton recently wrote for the Wall Street Journal in a piece entitled “The Case For Monetary Regime Change“: “But it is wholly legitimate, and entirely prudent, to question the infallibility of the Federal Reserve in calibrating the money supply to the needs of the economy…It’s entirely reasonable to ask whether this might be better assured by linking the supply of money and credit to gold or some other reference point as opposed to relying on the judgment of a dozen or so monetary officials meeting eight times a year to set interest rates.”
“It’s like paying the banks to do nothing,” Shelton told the New York Times, referring to the system of paying interest on the Fed’s excess reserves.