Here is a positive passage, showing her commitment to research and keeping an open mind:
We didn't know what we were going to find. One of the stressful things about the type of narrative research we do is that it involves a huge amount of work before the first regression can be run. But in this case, we thought the results would be interesting whichever way they came out.
Here is a less positive passage, praising the economic status quo and the figures who helped engineer it:
Not until the Volcker, Greenspan and now Bernanke era do you get a basically pretty sensible model-the view that inflation is bad, the sustainable rate of unemployment is moderate and inflation will respond to slack.
And where she didn't see the current crisis coming:
So I think the real question is going to be, What's the line we walk from here? Think about the action we saw just today [June 25], where the FOMC didn't keep lowering the federal funds rate. It said, "We're probably through the worst in the financial markets; we had to fight that fire, but now we're going to look at what's happening to inflation. There are benefits to low inflation, and so we're going to have to think about how much we stimulate the real economy and how much we're concerned about inflation." The fact that the FOMC is thinking this way suggests that even if they don't do everything exactly right, they're not going to make the sorts of huge mistakes policymakers made in the 1970s.
My initial impression is that Romer is favorable to the economic policy status quo, but at least she is willing to keep an open mind pending further research and real-world results. Looks to be another "centrist pragmatist" of the sort that we keep hearing so much about in Obama's cabinet. I'm going to walk out onto a limb and predict that Obama keeps appointing these sorts of advisors because that is who he is himself, rather than part of some secret plan to govern to the left.
Oh, and for some additional insight on Christina Romer, it appears that apart from Kerry and Obama, the only two canidates she has given money to were Bill Bradley and Wesley Clark. I won't divine want that means in terms of economic policy, but she does seem to have a habit of backing underdogs for the Democratic nomination. As a lifelong fan of underdogs myself, I find that encouraging.
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