Herman Cain and the Fed

Herman Cain and the Fed

By Joseph Lawler on 5.27.11 @ 12:45PM

Joshua Green at the Atlantic takes note of an interesting situation: Herman Cain, currently undertaking a populist and Tea Party-based campaign for the presidency, is a former Kansas City Federal Reserve chairman.
There are elements of the Tea Party, especially those influenced by Ron Paul, who are against the Fed in general. And the Tea Party has led the wider trend in Republican thought against loose monetary policy. For Cain to have been a member of the Fed and defend it some cases is an obstacle in his attempt to present himself as the Tea Party favorite.

Cain  was appointed as a Class C director of the Kansas City Fed board in 1992. In that capacity, he provided advice to the president of the KC Fed (the conservative Thomas Hoenig) about conditions for private, non-bank businesses. According to Green, that particular bank was very conservative at the time, and so was Cain: 

I had better luck with Drue Jennings, a Kansas City lawyer who served with Cain on the Federal Reserve Board and succeeded him as chairman. Jennings is quite fond of his old colleague. "Herman was a pleasure to work with," he told me. "His views were pretty consistent with those of the Fed at the time. Alan Greenspan was, of course, chairman and Herman was in lock stop with the policies of the Fed." Jennings added that this was not atypical; he could not recall a single dissent from anyone during this three-year term. Still, he said, Cain was no pushover. "He's a guy you'll never find in a gray area," Jennings said. "He's intelligent, well spoken, and very assertive to the point of almost being aggressive. He's anything but shy."
Jennings said Cain fit the profile of the Kansas City Fed. "Inflation was always the big bugaboo," he told me, "and when it comes to monetary policy, he was an inflation hawk. I'll tell you, that's the most conservative bunch of guys I've ever met." 

At a recent Spectator press event I had the opportunity to ask Cain about his views on the Federal Reserve. His view is that the Fed's current dual mandate is overbroad, and that it should not be tasked with promoting maximum employment. He argued that the only role of the Fed should be to stabilize the price level, and suggested that as president he would try to end the dual mandate.
While keeping inflation expectations stable doesn't necessarily entail a specific Fed stance (for instance, during a downturn it would be necessary for the Fed to engage in very loose monetary policy to avoid deflation), Cain made it clear that he favored tighter money for the current economy. In other venues, he's expressed approval of some kind of gold standard or other asset backing for U.S. currency. And he's not impressed by current Fed chairman Ben Bernanke's management of the crisis and weak recovery -- he said flatly that he wouldn't reappoint Bernanke in 2014 if he were president. Cain declined to suggest who he would replace Bernanke with, however. Although he had a few candidates in mind, he chuckled that he wouldn't want to invade their privacy just yet.