title:  Man Who Said There Was No Recession DURING The Great Recession Is Rumored For Top Economic Post
text: Reports are surfacing that CNBC s Larry Kudlow is on the short list of candidates for chairman the Council of Economic Advisers, which is the government s top economic policy group. Kudlow isn t just an advocate of the failed trickle-down theory of economics, he also claimed, back in 2007, that no recession was coming. As we all know, 2008 proved him dead wrong, and now Trump wants him in a top economic position.According to Craig Harrington, Director of the Economic Policy Program at Media Matters for America, this is how bad Kudlow is: According to the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), an award-winning nonprofit research organization that is perhaps best-known for determining a chronology of American business cycles and recessions, the Great Recession began in December 2007. Yet Kudlow published blogs on December 5, 6, and 7 of that year titled  The Recession Debate Is Over,   There Ain t No Recession,  and  Bush Boom Continues,  in the conservative National Review. By July 2008, as the unemployment rate continued to balloon in the seventh month of recession, Kudlow was still arguing in National Review that there was no recession or housing crisis. In  The Recession Debate Is Over, Kudlow claimed that the jobs numbers and business profits added up to no recession at all. In  There Ain t No Recession,  he doubled down on all of that, and in  Bush Boom Continues,  he actually said:That last one was published on Dec. 7, 2007. Eight months earlier, we began to see serious signs of an economic crahs with New Century Financial Corp., a major subprime lender, filing for bankruptcy. Unemployment began rising in Dec. 2007, and the Fed lowered short-term interest rates for the fifth time in four months.Kudlow didn t see any of that. He was focused entirely on the November jobs reports and business profits. He totally ignored other economic indicators. He s almost as bad as those who look only at the stock market for an idea of how our economy is doing.Moving on from Kudlow s absurdly incorrect predictions, in Feb. 2008, President Bush signed the first economic stimulus package into law, and then in March, the financial industry began crashing with the collapse of Bear Stearns. In April 2008, the Fed reduced interest rates yet again, and then in September, Lehmann Brothers collapsed.We all remember the chaos of the rest of 2008.This is more than simply putting someone who will work hard to make the rich richer and the poor poorer into an economic advisory position. This is someone whose economic experience and ideas are so far off that he couldn t, or wouldn t, see a recession coming despite the housing bubble collapse beginning in late 2006.Most economists worth their salt could see that foreshadowed the Great Recession, and knew that the Great Recession began at the end of 2007 (although Trump was  excited  for the housing crash because it meant more money for him).However, what can we expect from a president-elect who seems to see the presidency as just another reality show? Kudlow has published no scholarly papers on economics, and has no degree in economics at all, so he s not exactly qualified for the top economic position in our government.He plays an economist on television, though, and that s enough for Trump. Many of his cabinet picks seem to say that he has to know people from television in order to consider them for his cabinet. Kudlow is just another possibility that shows Trump has no idea what he s doing and thinks this is just another reality show.Featured image by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr 