President Trump is considering appointing Mohamed El-Erian as vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, CNBC reports.
Before Mr. Trump goes ahead with that, I hope that he or someone advising him takes a look at the earlier coverage of Mr. El-Erian here at FutureOfCapitalism.
A 2013 column about President Obama's decision to name El-Erian as chairman of his "Global Development Council" pointed out:
El-Erian's reputation as a money manager is not without its blemishes. He did a brief tour—parts of 2006 and 2007—as the manager of Harvard University's endowment, leaving it ill-prepared for the economic downturn that ensued shortly thereafter.
In October 2009, with Pimco colleague Bill Gross, El-Erian forecast a "new normal" of asset returns of half what they were in previous decades. That turned out, at least so far, to have been spectacularly wrong, at least when it comes to U.S. stocks, which were up about 17 percent in 2010 and 16 percent in 2012. A New York Times article published in July 2012 reported that El-Erian had been paid $100 million by Pimco in 2011, a year in which Pimco's flagship Total Return fund was in the bottom 10 percent of bond funds.
In 2014 we noted Mr. El-Erian cheering Stanford University's decision to divest from coal companies.
In 2010 we noted Warren Buffett's private October 6, 2018 letter to then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, telling "Hank" that "Bill, Mohamed, Lloyd and I -- and I'm sure a myriad of others -- are ready to help." The references were to Bill Gross and Mohamed El-Erian of Pimco and to Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs.
Maybe this is the sort of thing Mr. Trump really wants in the no. 2 job at the Fed, but maybe it isn't.
