Sarah Bloom Raskin Bows Out

I wrote about Ms Raskin in my Feb. 24 post here. Biden has sought to make her vice chair of the Federal Reserve for supervision.

I said that some Republicans were making any unholy fuss about this appointment, for two bad reasons and one not-so-bad reason. The bad reasons are: (first) she is the wife of Rep. Jamie Raskin (D - Md) against whom the Republicans have grudges, and (second) she believes she could use the levers of bank supervision to do something positive about carbon emissions/climate change issues.

Those are bad reasons because first, personal grudges make mad policy and, second, there isn't much she could do about that subject, except advance the cause of transparency, which doesn't sound awful to me.

The not-so-bad reason involves crony capitalism. Raskin has been a long-term occupant of the revolving door between the banking industry and its regulators, cashing in as part of the former on her experiences and contacts within the latter. This appointment would be another turn of that door. It makes sense to be opposed to that sort of institutional arrangement, although with regard to today's Republicans this line of attack too makes one shake one's head at their nerve.

All that is past and prologue. This is new. Senator Joe (Coal) Manchin came out this week against the Raskin appointment. This meant that the President wasn't going to be able to push it through and that Republicans-plus Manchin could use Raskin as a weapon to hold up other Biden appointments who might otherwise have an easier time of it.

Ms Raskin has bowed to the logic of the situation. and has withdrawn her name from consideration for the post.

Senator Manchin (D - WV) explained his reasoning thus: "Her previous public statements have failed to satisfactorily address my concerns about the critical importance of financing an all-of-the-above energy policy to meet our nations critical energy needs."

She went down, in other words, for the second of the bad reasons. Just making a note.

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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