In traditional fashion, Donald Trump elevated the question of who would take the reins of the Federal Reserve into a dramatic event. Just hours before the announcement of Kevin Warsh, alternative candidates were seen as the betting favorite. Instead, the crown was granted to Mr.

The scale of fraud uncovered in recent years has exposed how government transfer programs function, even as meaningful public or legislative reckoning remains largely absent. What began as a series of pandemic-related scandals has revealed something broader and more troubling: large-scale fraud is not an anomaly within the modern welfare state. The federal government, taxpayers, lose between $233 billion and $521 billion annually to fraud, based on data from 2018 to 2022.

Warsh’s hawkish credentials are real. His hawkish future is not. Trump didn’t pick him to raise rates and crash markets before the midterms. 

If confirmed by the Senate, Warsh would succeed current Fed Chair Jerome Powell, whose term ends in May.

[Living High and Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence by Peter Unger (Oxford University Press, 1996; xii + 187pp.)]

It has been well said by others that so-called “Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)”—similar to the Holy Roman Empire—is not modern, not monetary, and not a theory.