Sherrod Brown, who chairs the Economic Policy Subcommittee of the Senate’s Banking Committe, has sent a letter to the Obama administration asking that it take action to fill the two (and soon to be three) vacancies on the Fed board. Specifically, Brown wants Obama to use the appointment to find individuals committed to more robust consumer protection, to lowering unemployment rather than obsessing about inflation, and to “releasing e-mails related to the Fed’s involvement in the AIG bailout.”
I am personally not so interested in the AIG emails issue (though transparency is always nice) if we could get people who are good on the other two scores.
Without using the words “second stimulus,” the Congress has quietly been adding a fair amount of additional stimulus to the economy in the form of some different “extenders” bills, which is good. But the unemployment rate is still very high, and the official projections are calling for growth in 2011 that’s too weak to bring us to anything like an acceptable labor market situation.