Narayana Kocherlakota, Columnist

Ask the Next President About the Fed

How would Trump or Clinton choose a Fed chair?

March 30, 2016 at 11:00 AM UTC

Narayana Kocherlakota is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is a professor of economics at the University of Rochester and was president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis from 2009 to 2015.

What's your view on inflation targeting?
Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

Provide news feedback or report an error

Site feedback:

Take our Survey

This article is for subscribers only.

The next U.S. president will have the opportunity to appoint (or re-appoint) someone to one of the most powerful positions in the world: the chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve. Yet voters still know far too little about how the leading presidential candidates would go about choosing.

As far as I can tell, none of the websites of the five leading candidates -- Hillary Clinton, Ted Cruz, John Kasich, Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump -- offers any commentary on monetary policy or the Federal Reserve. Other clues, such as an oped by Senator Sanders on structural reform of the Fed or Senator Cruz's support for a return to the gold standard, provide only a limited understanding of how they might approach selecting a Fed chair.