Kevin Warsh

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In early 2006, Kevin Warsh was nominated to the Board of Governors for the U.S. Federal Reserve System by U.S. President George W. Bush. The U.S. Senate dutifully confirmed the appointment that year. A graduate of Stanford University and Harvard Law School, Warsh was 35 years old at the time of the appointment.

1 Academic background
2 Professional experience
3 Personal background
4 Criticism of appointment
5 References

[edit] Academic background

Warsh received an A.B. in public policy (with honors) from Stanford in 1992, including a few courses in economics and statistics. He went on to study law at Harvard and received a J.D. (cum laude) in 1995. He also took a few courses in market economics and debt capital markets at Harvard Business School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management. However, Warsh does not hold any academic degree, much less a Ph.D., in economics.

[edit] Professional experience

From 1995 to 2002, Warsh worked for Morgan Stanley in New York City, ultimately becoming a Vice President and Executive Director in the Mergers and Acquisitions Department. From 2002 to 2006, he was Special Assistant to the President for Economic Policy and Executive Secretary of the National Economic Council. His primary areas of responsibility included domestic finance, banking and securities regulatory policy, and consumer protection.

[edit] Personal background

Since 2002, Warsh has been married to Jane Lauder, an heir to the Estee Lauder cosmetics fortune.

[edit] Criticism of appointment

"Kevin Warsh is not a good idea," said former Fed Vice Chairman Preston Martin, a Republican who was appointed by U.S. President Ronald Reagan in 1982, of Warsh's nomination to a seat on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. "If I were on the Senate Banking Committee," which must approve Fed nominees, "I would vote against him."

Noam Scheiber, senior editor of The New Republic, made the following comments about Warsh's appointment to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors: "Other than a Harvard Law degree and four years in the White House, the only qualification that jumps out at you is the $165,000-plus his father-in-law has donated to various Republican committees since 2002. Warsh may be perfectly capable of hazarding opinions about the future of the economy. But, by that standard, there are tens of thousands of people entitled to a seat on the Fed. ...Appointing someone like him to the Federal Reserve board dramatically lowers the bar for future appointments, which makes it more likely that the body of powerful technocrats will come to be dominated by political hacks. ...The only way you appoint Kevin Warsh to a seat on the Federal Reserve board is if you have little respect for the practice of economic policy-making and you're not ashamed to admit it."