I’ve watched Larry Kudlow for years on CNBC and marveled at his stupidity. It appears someone else was watching and liked what they saw, via The Atlantic:
…Kudlow will reportedly be nominated to chair the White House Council of Economic Advisers, a position that will require him to advise the president on economic policy and crank out 600-page research reports. Observers were quick to note that Kudlow will be the unusual case of a CEA chief without a Ph.D. in economics, much less an undergraduate degree in the field. Old columns written by Kudlow also resurfaced such as one National Review in 2002 in which he lobbied for the U.S. to invade Iraq to rally the stock market or another in December 2007 in which he declared that there was no recession coming.
Kudlow’s appointment marks a return of supply-side economics, a regimen of low taxes and little regulation of which he has long been an adherent since his days as a budget official in the Reagan administration. Kudlow, who served as an advisor on Trump’s campaign, expressed enthusiasm about the future of the American economy under President-elect Trump in recent days. “I like what I see,” Kudlow said recently of Trump’s cabinet appointments. “The tax-cut program will really put a booster rocket underneath this economy. The top people in the administration are all there to push that—that’s why I like them.”
This praise notwithstanding, Kudlow seems poised to disagree with Trump’s swaggering rhetoric against trade agreements such as NAFTA, a centerpiece of the Trump campaign. The news of Kudlow’s likely appointment was leakedduring a speech by Stephen Moore, the conservative economist, who worked alongside Kudlow on Trump’s campaign. In his remarks on Thursday, Moore recounted a disagreement between Kudlow and Trump. “Larry said, ‘Donald, we can’t work for you. We believe in free trade and you’re more of a protectionist,’” he recalled. “And he [Trump] said, ‘Look, I’m not a protectionist, and I want a change in the trade laws, but I’m not a protectionist.’” The implications of this are unclear.
Kudlow, for his part, seems to take Trump at his word on trade. “I think the general thrust of his trade policy will be negotiation and re-negotiation; the art of the deal,” Kudlow said at a panel earlier this week. “I think there are going to be carrots and sticks here, absolutely. I don’t believe—again, this is just me—I don’t believe that he is a major protectionist in its purist form. I don’t expect him to start slapping big tariffs here and there.”
Nobody is perfect of course but some are better than others, via Calculated Risk:
Larry Kudlow is usually wrong and frequently absurd, as an example, in June 2005 Kudlow wrote “The Housing Bears are Wrong Again” and called me (or people like me) “bubbleheads”.
Homebuilders led the stock parade this week with a fantastic 11 percent gain. This is a group that hedge funds and bubbleheads love to hate. All the bond bears have been dead wrong in predicting sky-high mortgage rates. So have all the bubbleheads who expect housing-price crashes in Las Vegas or Naples, Florida, to bring down the consumer, the rest of the economy, and the entire stock market.I guess I was one of those “bubbleheads”!
In December 2007, he wrote: Bush Boom Continues
There’s no recession coming. The pessimistas were wrong. It’s not going to happen. At a bare minimum, we are looking at Goldilocks 2.0. (And that’s a minimum). Goldilocks is alive and well. The Bush boom is alive and well. It’s finishing up its sixth consecutive year with more to come. Yes, it’s still the greatest story never told.Note the date of the article. The recession started in December 2007!
Note: At the beginning of 2007 I predicted a recession would start that year – made it by one month. It seems I’m always on the opposite side from Kudlow of each forecast – and one of us has been consistently wrong.
In 2014, Kudlow claimed: “I’ve always believed the 1990s were Ronald Reagan’s third term.”
In that piece, Kudlow was rewriting his own history. Near the beginning of Clinton’s first term, Kudlow was arguing Clinton’s policies would take the economy into a deep recession or even depression. Kudlow was wrong then (I remember because I was on the other side of that debate), so he can’t claim he “always believed” now. Nonsense.
Also in 2007, Kudlow wrote: A Stock Market Vote of Confidence for Bush:
“I have long believed that stock markets are the best barometer of the health, wealth and security of a nation. And today’s stock market message is an unmistakable vote of confidence for the president.”Well, maybe Kudlow had a point … but not for the President he was writing about.
Now Larry Kudlow will be the new administration’s chief economist. Oh my.
Oh my, indeed.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not totally opposed to supply-side economics. Appropriate deregulation, tax cuts and a focus on investment can be useful tools when seeking to reward and promote productive effort, even if phenomenon like the Laffer Curve – the notion that tax cuts boost tax revenue – are self-evidently stupid.
But, it would obviously serve a President better to have some person advising him who had a clue about where the economy is at at any given moment.
