Austan Goolsbee has replaced Christina Rohmer as the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers.
I was on a panel at the SALT Conference with him (and Bill Thomas of the FCIC), discussing bailouts, economics, stimulus, taxes. In addition to the hour on stage, our small group spent another 45 minutes backstage chatting.
I came away very impressed with him — very smart guy, logical, lots of common sense with a good sense of humor. I didn’t sense was a hard core partisan, but he is definitely not a Supply Sider.
Its a good appointment — and regular readers know I have been none too impressed with Obama’s prior economic appointments.
I only hope that he looks outside of the mainstream crowd of economists, who have done an awful job over the past decade analyzing, understanding and anticipating the present. They over-estimated job creation in the 2000s, under-estimated the impact of deregulation/derivatives/subprime, and missed not one but 3 of the biggest bubbles in mankind’s history: The Tech Crash, the Credit bubble, and the most recent market collapse.
A little outside the box thinking will go along way . . .
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