Change!

“President-elect Barack Obama will appoint former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker on Wednesday to be the chairman of a new White House advisory board tasked with helping to lift the nation from recession and stabilize financial markets, Democratic officials say.

University of Chicago economist Austan Goolsbee, one of Mr. Obama’s longest-serving policy advisers, will serve as the board’s staff director, along with his duties as a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. Members of the panel will be drawn from a cross-section of citizens outside the government, chosen for their independence and nonpartisanship.

The board’s mission won’t be to supplant the policy-making role of the Treasury Department and other agencies, but to give Mr. Obama an official forum for getting expert advice outside the normal bureaucratic channels. It will give briefings to the president.

The panel, called the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, is modeled on the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board established by then-President Dwight Eisenhower in 1956, at the height of the Cold War, when officials worried that that the existing bureaucratic structure was inadequate to help the U.S. keep pace with the Soviet threat. The financial crisis has drawn similar worries that the government isn’t properly organized to monitor and respond to modern financial markets.”

Much about Volcker as written today is hogwash and revisionist as John Tamney wrote back in Feb after Volcker – a lifelong democrat – endorsed Obama for president:

“With not an insignificant amount of fanfare last week, former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker endorsed Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy. His endorsement drew more attention than it normally might have in that while Volcker is a lifelong Democrat, his legend is inextricably linked to Ronald Reagan’s, and the ‘80s economic revolution that reversed the U.S.’s flagging economic fortunes.

Given Volcker’s historical ties to Reagan, some Republicans logically took offense to his seeming apostasy. Their dismay is misplaced. Volcker was never on board with the Reagan economic plan in the way that modern history suggests, and rather than an essential driver of the ‘80s economic renaissance, a more realistic account of Volcker’s early years at the Fed shows that far from a facilitator of pro-growth policies, Volcker’s actions nearly derailed Reagan’s economic plan and presidency altogether.

Though Reagan spoke confidently of renewed economic optimism that would result from tax cuts, Volcker’s countenance was very dark, with frequent pronunciations about us not being so naïve as to assume “there are quick and painless solutions” to the economic problems we faced. To Volcker, there was no way we could “avoid a clash between monetary restraint….and the growth of economic activity;” this despite the truth that growing economies require more money, not less.

Given his skeptical views about the Reagan tax cuts, Volcker lobbied in secret against their passage owing to his view that they would lead to a massive revenue shortfall. While Fed Chairman Fred Schultz worked on House members, Volcker lobbied senators to vote against the cuts.

As George Schultz told William Greider in Secrets of the Temple, Volcker’s position was that, “We are in favor of a tax cut, but you must recognize that if you can’t accomplish this with much bigger budget cuts than you are contemplating, it’s going to put much more pressure on us and that means higher interest rates.” Shades of Robert Rubin.

Using his control of the interest rate lever as a weapon, Volcker kept money “tight” in order to prize tax increases out of the White House. More on monetary policy later, but bad dollar policy brought on the ’81-’82 recession, and remarkably led to a bill that increased taxes ahead of the 1982 elections. Unsurprisingly, the Republicans lost 26 House seats.

Even more galling, according to Paul Craig Roberts’ The Supply-Side Revolution, not a single Democrat voted for the tax increase. None needed to in that as Mark Shields wrote in the Washington Post at the time, Reagan’s advisors (including Volcker) did all of their dirty work for them in terms of attracting Republican votes in favor of tax increases. Thanks to economic advisors that did not share Reagan’s optimism about tax cuts, by 1983 the Reagan tax cuts of ’81 had disappeared in dollar terms. The marginal incentives of course remained, but due to powerful opposition on the part of Volcker, Alan Greenspan and others, Reagan’s tax program was severely compromised.”