The big picture: Moore has few apparent qualifications for a seat on the Fed board. Instead, he is being rewarded for his work on Trump’s election campaign and for his gushing praise of Trump in places like his “Trumponomics” book.
The proximate cause of his nomination seems to be a recent WSJ op-ed that Moore wrote claiming “the Trump administration’s pro-growth policies have attracted investment from around the globe,” and which, bizarrely, urged the Fed to link domestic interest rates to international commodity prices.
Moore would politicize the Fed in an unprecedented manner: He has consistently called for higher interest rates whenever a Democrat is in the White House and lower rates when it’s a Republican. Were he to be confirmed — an act that itself would qualify as state capture — Fed chair Jay Powell could no longer truthfully say that his rate-setting committee is independent, unswayed by partisan political considerations. That independence has been a Fed bedrock for decades.
