September 6, 2013
NY Times Editorial
The Federal Reserve Nomination
by The Editorial Board (09-05-13)
In July, when news broke that President Obama might nominate Lawrence Summers to be the next chairman of the Federal Reserve, several Democratic senators wrote a letter to the President in praise of Janet Yellen, the current Fed vice chairwoman who many presumed would be the nominee. The letter didn’t mention Mr. Summers; rather, it recounted Ms. Yellen’s formidable qualifications and urged the President to nominate her. Perhaps it was too subtle.
Dr. Janet Yellen
Mr. Obama is expected to announce his nominee soon, and, by all accounts, Mr. Summers is still a contender. It is time for senators of both parties who appreciate the importance of this nomination to tell the President that Mr. Summers would be the wrong choice.
Mr. Summers’s reputation is replete with evidence of a temperament unsuited to lead the Fed. He is known for cooperation when he works with those he perceives as having more power than he does, and for dismissiveness toward those he perceives as less powerful. Those traits would be especially destructive at the Fed, where board members and regional bank presidents all bring their own considerable political power and intellectual heft to the Fed’s decision-making on monetary policy and financial regulation. Putting Mr. Summers in charge would risk institutional discord or worse, dysfunction.
His record on financial regulation is abysmal, and he has not acknowledged the errors. In the late 1990s, Mr. Summers was instrumental in deregulating derivatives and in repealing the Glass-Steagall banking law. He has said that the resulting financial crisis was unforeseeable, which is wrong. He waged public battles against regulators who correctly argued for regulating derivatives and disparaged the comments of a prominent economist who early on identified risks in the too-big-to-fail banking system. This is precisely the wrong background for the next Fed leader, who will take charge in the middle of the delayed rule-making for the Dodd-Frank financial reform law.
More recently, as the top economic adviser to Mr. Obama in the first term, Mr. Summers only belatedly supported reforms under the Volcker Rule to curb bank size and recklessness, a rule that still has not been put in place. Under the law, the next Fed leader is supposed to work with other regulators to dismantle big banks on the verge of failure, rather than prop them up. Given his background, Mr. Summers would be more likely to use the implicit and explicit powers of the Fed to shield and preserve the too-big-to-fail system.
Mr. Summers has also shown an indifference to the effects of economic decisions on ordinary people — the opposite of what is needed in a Fed leader at a time of high unemployment. He advised the President to support a stimulus that other economists correctly warned was too small. He resisted bankruptcy relief for underwater homeowners that would have forced banks into mortgage modifications — even as the administration spared no expense to bail out the banks.
Senators who have endorsed Ms. Yellen would do well to let Mr. Obama know, either publicly or through back channels, that their endorsement translates into a no vote for Mr. Summers.
Meet The New York Times’s Editorial Board »
Andrew Rosenthal, Editor
@andyrNYT
AndrewMRosenthal
Andrew Rosenthal, the editorial page editor of The New York Times, is in charge of the paper’s opinion pages, both in the newspaper and online. He oversees the editorial board, the Letters and Op-Ed departments, as well as the Editorial and Op-Ed sections of NYTimes.com. The editorial department of the paper is completely separate from the news operations and Mr. Rosenthal answers directly to the publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr.
He is assisted by Deputy Editorial Page Editors Terry Tang, for the editorial page, and Trish Hall, for the Op-Ed Page, and by Tom Feyer, the Letters editor.
Under his direction, the 18 members of the board prepare the paper’s editorials. The board holds regular meetings to discuss current issues. The editorials are written by individual board members in consultation with their colleagues, and are edited by Mr. Rosenthal and Ms. Tang.
Mr. Rosenthal became editorial page editor on Jan. 8, 2007. He was deputy editorial page editor since September 2003. Previously he served as assistant managing editor for news and foreign editor of The Times. He also served as national editor for six months in 2000, supervising coverage of the presidential elections and the post-election day recount, and as Washington editor. As a Washington correspondent, Mr. Rosenthal covered the Bush administration, the 1988 and 1992 presidential elections and the Persian Gulf War.
Prior to joining The Times in March 1987, Mr. Rosenthal worked at the Associated Press, where he served as Moscow bureau chief. Born in New Delhi, India, Mr. Rosenthal graduated from the University of Denver with a B.A. degree in American history in 1978.
Terry Tang, Deputy Editorial Page Editor
Terry Tang joined the Times in 1997. She has been editor of the Op-Ed page, an editorial writer covering law, health care and national issues, deputy technology editor, major beats editor for Metro news and an editor at Room for Debate. She was previously a columnist and editorial writer at the Seattle Times, and a staff writer at the Seattle Weekly. Ms. Tang has a B.A. in economics from Yale University and a J.D. from New York University School of Law. She was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard in 1992-1993.
Robert B. Semple Jr., Associate Editor
Robert Semple joined the Washington Bureau of The Times in the fall of 1963. He covered housing and civil rights during the Johnson administration, spent a year covering President Johnson himself, and served as White House correspondent during Richard Nixon’s first term. He served thereafter as deputy national editor (1973-75), London bureau chief (1975-77), foreign editor (1977-82), editor of the Op-Ed Page (1982-88) and associate editor of the Editorial Page (1988 to present). He received the Pulitzer Prize in 1996 for his editorials on environmental issues.
Mr. Semple was born in St. Louis, raised in Michigan and educated at Andover, Yale and the University of California, where he received a master’s degree in history in 1961.
David Firestone, Projects Editor, National Politics, the White House and Congress
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David Firestone, who joined the editorial board in 2010, has worked for The New York Times since 1993. He began as Queens bureau chief, and has also been City Hall bureau chief, Public Lives columnist, a national correspondent based in Atlanta, a Washington correspondent, and deputy metropolitan editor. He has covered numerous political campaigns and the 2000 presidential recount in Florida.
Most recently, he was deputy national editor, supervising the National Desk’s coverage of Hurricane Katrina and the South as well as legal and economic issues. He has also been a reporter for New York Newsday, where he covered the conflict in Bosnia and the attacks on Israel during the first Gulf War; the Dallas Times Herald; and the Kansas City Star. He grew up in Kansas City and is a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism. He is married, with two sons, and lives in Brooklyn.
Vikas Bajaj, Business, International Economics
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Vikas Bajaj has worked at The New York Times since 2005. Before joining the editorial board in 2012, he was a correspondent based in Mumbai, India. He previously covered housing and financial markets for the Business section in New York. Born in Mumbai, Mr. Bajaj grew up there and in Bangkok, and he received a bachelor’s in journalism from Michigan State University. He came to The Times from The Dallas Morning News.
Philip M. Boffey, Science
Philip M. Boffey is an editorial writer at The New York Times. He formerly served as a reporter, science and health editor and deputy editorial page editor. Mr. Boffey was a member of two reporting teams that won Pulitzer Prizes: the first in 1986 for a series on the “Star Wars” missile defense system, the second in 1987 for coverage of the Challenger space shuttle disaster. He has been president of the National Association of Science Writers and is a director of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing. Mr. Boffey is the author of “The Brain Bank of America,” an investigation of the National Academy of Sciences, published in 1975.
Born in East Orange, N.J., Mr. Boffey received an A.B. degree, magna cum laude, in history, from Harvard College in 1958.
Francis X. Clines, National Politics, Congress, Campaign Finance
Before joining the editorial board in 2002, Francis X. Clines spent 40 years as a reporter for The Times on the city, national and foreign news staffs. His assignments ranged from City Hall to Appalachia, from Ireland to Uzbekistan, from the Reagan White House to Communism’s last stand in the Kremlin. Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., he won the Meyer Berger Award for his “About New York” columns, as well as a Polk Award for coverage of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Lawrence Downes, Immigration, Veterans Issues
Lawrence Downes, who joined the editorial board in 2004, has worked for The New York Times since 1993. He served on the National desk as enterprise editor and as deputy political editor during the 2000 presidential campaign. From 1998 to 2000, Mr. Downes was a weekend editor on the Metro desk and, before that, deputy weekend editor and copy editor. Mr. Downes was a copy editor at Newsday from 1992 to 1993 and at the Chicago Sun-Times from 1989 to 1992. Mr. Downes received a B.A. degree in English from Fordham University in 1986. He also attended the University of Missouri School of Journalism from 1987 to 1989.
Carol Giacomo, Foreign Affairs
@giacomonyt
Carol Giacomo, a former diplomatic correspondent for Reuters in Washington, covered foreign policy for the international wire service for more than two decades before joining The Times editorial board in August 2007. In her previous position, she traveled over 1 million miles to more than 100 countries with eight secretaries of state and various other senior U.S. officials. In 2009, she won the Georgetown University Weintal Prize for diplomatic reporting. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. In 1999-2000, she was a senior fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace, researching U.S. economic and foreign policy decision-making during the Asian financial crisis. She has been a guest lecturer at the U.S. National War College, among other academic institutions. Born and raised in Connecticut, she holds a B.A. in English Literature from Regis College, Weston, Mass. She began her professional journalism career at the Lowell Sun in Lowell, Mass., and later worked for the Hartford Courant in the city hall, state capitol and Washington bureaus.
Verlyn Klinkenborg, Agriculture, Environment, Culture
Verlyn Klinkenborg has been a member of the editorial board since 1997. He was born in Meeker, Colo., in 1952 and grew up in Iowa and California. Then he came East and never got away again. He has a Ph.D. in English Literature from Princeton University and teaches at Pomona College and Yale University. He is the author of six books of nonfiction: Making Hay (1986), The Last Fine Time (1991), The Rural Life (2003), Timothy: Or, Notes of an Abject Reptile (2006), Several Short Sentences About Writing (2012), and More Scenes From The Rural Life (2013). He lives on a small farm in Columbia County, New York. Over the years, he has written about many subjects for the editorial board, including the editorial essays called “The Rural Life.” His main fields are agriculture, environmental issues, the natural world, and all non-human species.
Juliet Lapidos, Staff Editor
@julietlapidos
Juliet Lapidos joined The Times in 2011 as a staff editor and edits the Taking Note blog. Before coming to the newspaper, she was a culture editor at Slate. She holds a B.A. in comparative literature from Yale University and an M.Phil. in English literature from the University of Cambridge, where she was a Gates Scholar.
Eleanor Randolph, New York State, Northeast Region, Media
@EleanorRandolph
Eleanor Randolph is a native of Florida, a graduate of Emory University and veteran journalist who began working at a newspaper in Pensacola, Fla., in 1968. She has covered national politics and the media for The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, among others. Her articles have appeared in Vogue, Esquire, the New Republic and other magazines. After working from 1991 to 1993 in Moscow, she wrote a book on Russian life called “Waking the Tempests.” A member of The Times editorial staff since 1998, she is the author of the “Fixing Albany” series on state government.
Dorothy Samuels, Law, Civil Rights, National Affairs
A member of the editorial board since 1984, Dorothy Samuels writes on a wide array of legal and social policy issues. Prior to joining The Times, she briefly practiced corporate law with a big Wall Street firm, leaving there to pursue her interests in public policy and journalism. For four years, Ms. Samuels served as executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, the largest affiliate of the national A.C.L.U. In 2001, in a change of pace, she published a comic novel, “Filthy Rich.” Ms. Samuels is a graduate of Bryn Mawr College and Northeastern University School of Law.
Brent Staples, Education, Criminal Justice, Economics
Brent Staples joined The Times editorial board in 1990. His editorials and essays are included in dozens of college readers throughout the United States and abroad. Before joining the editorial page, he served as an editor of The New York Times Book Review and an assistant editor for metropolitan news. Mr. Staples holds a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Chicago and is author of “Parallel Time,” a memoir, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.
Teresa Tritch, Economic Issues, Tax Policy
Before joining the editorial board in 2004, Teresa Tritch spent 12 years at Money magazine, as a staff writer, Washington, D.C., bureau chief and senior editor, covering politics, finance and taxes. She has also been a contributing editor for the Stanford Social Innovation Review, covering nonprofits, and for the Gallup Management Journal, covering workplace issues, as well as co-editor of a book on Iraq, “America at War,” a joint project of CBS and Simon and Schuster. Ms. Tritch, a Los Angeles native, holds a B.A. in German from UCLA and an M.S. in Journalism from Columbia University. In 2000, she was a Knight-Bagehot fellow in Business and Economics Journalism at Columbia.
David C. Unger, Foreign Affairs
David C. Unger was born and raised in Brooklyn. He is a product of the New York City public school system and worked for three years as an elementary school teacher in Staten Island and Brooklyn. After studying modern history at Cornell University, the University of Wisconsin and the University of Texas, he joined The Times in 1977 as a news clerk for the editorial board. He has traveled widely on four continents and is now the paper’s senior editorial writer on foreign affairs. He is the author of “The Emergency State” (2012).
Jesse Wegman, The Supreme Court, Legal Affairs
@jessewegman
Jesse Wegman joined the editorial board in 2013. He was previously a senior editor at The Daily Beast and Newsweek, a legal news editor at Reuters, and the managing editor of The New York Observer. In 2010, he received a Soros Justice Fellowship to write a book about jailhouse lawyers. He graduated from New York University School of Law in 2005. Before that, he was a producer and reporter for several National Public Radio programs.
All photos by Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
A version of this editorial appears in print on September 6, 2013, on page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: The Federal Reserve Nomination .
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/opinion/the-federal-reserve-nomination.html?ref=global&_r=0