Steve Blitz Morning Notes

One signature problem of organizations that fail is that everyone running the place have spent their lives on the inside talking pretty much only to themselves. Faced with a challenging economic environment some fresh thinking, unlike Bernanke's testimony, might help the Republic emerge from the current mess with better balanced growth. Instead, and not surprisingly, this article appears in the WSJ regarding deck chair shuffling amongst economists in D.C. To be fair, we would see similar people moves if Obama were Republican, only with some different institutions thrown in.

Here is the article from the WSJ Blog "Fed Staffer Heads to Brookings" by Sudeep Reddy.

The Brookings Institution sent a slew of economists into the government in recent months, from Jason Furman to the White House National Economic Council (after working for the Obama campaign) to Douglas Elmendorf at the Congressional Budget Office to White House Budget Director Peter Orszag (at Brookings before heading CBO). Now it’s getting a couple of additions from the government.

The think tank said today the new co-directors of its Economic Studies program will be Karen Dynan, a Federal Reserve staffer, and Ted Gayer, a Georgetown professor. The program’s director since 2006, Bill Gale, will continue his research at Brookings heading other programs (the Tax Policy Center and Retirement Security Project).

Dynan, who has been at the Fed since 1992, was a senior economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers from 2003 to 2004. (She’s married to the aforementioned Elmendorf, the Brookings alum who heads CBO.) Gayer, a public policy professor at Georgetown, was Deputy Assistant Secretary for Microeconomic Analysis at the Department of the Treasury in 2007 and 2008. He also was a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.