Arduin's former partner draws brutal reviews after Trump picks him for Fed

Years before becoming temporary budget director in Alaska, Donna Arduin was partners in a consulting compmay, “Arduin, Laffer & Moore Econometrics,” which promoted itself as including “some of the most highly respected minds on the planet” on the staff.

In addition to Arduin, the others were Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore.

At its start, the company claimed that it “pools the talents of three acclaimed experts who possess the knowledge and experience to understand the complex decisions faced daily by businesses and governments.

Moore has now been named to fill a seat on the Federal Reserve Board by President Trump. His main qualification for that post is his unceasing flattery of Trump. With every utterance he confirms the old Russian proverb that “it is better to bow too low than to not bow low enough.”

Moore has suggested that Trump deserves to have a Nobel Prize in economics.

The response to Moore’s selection has been brutal by all those who are the least bit skeptical of Trump.

“Steve is a perfectly amiable guy, but he does not have the intellectual gravitas for this important job," Harvard economist Gregory Mankiw wrote. "If you doubt it, read his latest book, “Trumponomics,’ or my review of it.”

“It is time for senators to do their job. Mr. Moore should not be confirmed,” he said.

Mankiw, who served as head of the White House Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush, said that “The tribalism of Moore and Laffer’s approach stems primarily from their devotion to a single issue: the level of taxation.”

On March 14, Moore wrote that the policies of the Federal Reserve were hindering U.S. growth, a point of view championed by Trump.

Steven Pearlstein, a columnist for the Washington Post, called Moore a right-wing crackpot, an incompetent fool and an ideological hack. The confirmation vote on Moore would be a “sanity test” for Senate Republicans, he said.

“The only way Moore is able to continue peddling his supply-side nonsense is to simply make stuff up, hoping nobody will notice. A few years back, Miriam Pepper, the editorial-page editor of the Kansas City Star, caught him lying red-handed in an op-ed she had published. She banned him from ever appearing on her pages again. Indeed, outside the alternate-reality bubbles of Fox News, the Heritage Foundation, the Wall Street Journal editorial page and the Trump White House, Moore has no credibility, even as a TV economist,” Pearlstein wrote.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman said that Moore “isn't just a hack, with terrible judgment. He's a hack who has repeatedly shown himself unable even to get basic facts right.”

"This is the first genuinely bad Trump pick for the Fed," wrote Justin Wolfers, an economics professor at the University of Michigan. "He hasn't gotten a thing right in twenty years, (check the record), and the Senate should not confirm him."

On Dec. 30 on Fox News, Moore claimed that the U.S. was experience “deflation” with dropping commodity prices, a statement that seems to have no connection to reality. When he mentions the falling price of soybeans, as he has done frequently, he neglects to say that the Trump trade war with China has led to lower sales and lower prices.

He told Paul Gigot of the Wall Street Journal, “And when you ask me one of the problems in 2019, I'm really worried about the deflationary effect of these interest rate hikes. I think the president is absolutely -- it's proper for him to say, why is the Fed doing this. Now whether he could fire the Fed chairman, I think that's probably been taken off the table. But I think the Fed really should be reversing some of these policy mistakes.”

“All right. But some of it is slowing global demand,” Gigot said.

“Oh, I don't know about that,” Moore said.

“But there's no question that the global economy is slowing,” Gigot replied.

In that same exchange, Gigot also challenged Moore about this attacks on the Federal Reserve, “I don't think they are trying to wreck the economy, Steve.”

Cullen Roche, the founder of Orcam Financial Group, said that Moore is not an economist and doesn’t understand how Federal Reserve policy works.

‘His predictions about the economy are, to be kind, a revolving door of wrongness in a way that makes you wonder how this revolving door is still in operation,” Roche wrote.