Who Should Be the Next President of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco?

Memo to Self: Now that John Williams is heading to become President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Vice Chair of the Federal Open Market Committee, who should take his place as President of the Federal Reserve bank of San Francisco?

  • Mary Daly?
  • Christie Romer?
  • Glenn Rudebusch?
  • Thinking outside the box, Takeo Hoshi?
  • Thinking way outside the box, Enrico Moretti?
  • Thinking way way outside the box, Raj Chetty?

Ideal candidates should I think, be in their early 50s, and should be prepared to lead an analytical and operations orientation of the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank toward one or more of:

  • Financial system safety-and-soundness regulation
  • Financial system consumer finance regulation
  • Asia and its place in the global financial system
  • Tech and its place in the global financial system
  • Regional economic development issues.

Must-read: Matthew Yglesias: “Seattle Shows San Francisco and New York How to Fix the Housing Crisis”

Must-Read: Matthew Yglesias: Seattle Shows San Francisco and New York How to Fix the Housing Crisis: “As California’s Legislative Analysis Office wrote…

…Washington state centraliz[es] more planning functions at the state level…. Skeptics often note that new construction tends to target the high end of the market…. And that’s true here. Stiles reports that the weakness in the market is at the high end, “where 5.4 percent of the units are vacant,” while cheaper rentals feature a lower vacancy rate. But these markets are all logically linked. As proprietors of luxury buildings begin to lower rents in response to high vacancy rates, some people currently in mid-market housing will take advantage of the opportunity to upgrade. That puts downward price pressure on the middle of the market and draws more people further up the chain. None of this exactly makes Seattle a cheap place to live–land is still more expensive there than it is in Atlanta, and multi-family apartment buildings are often more expensive to build than sprawling single-family homes. But a high level of construction ensures that the homeland of Microsoft and Amazon remains substantially cheaper than the Bay Area homeland of Apple and Google.

Must-Read: Jason Furman: on Residential Housing Supply, NIMBYism, and Economic Growth

Must-Read: Jason Furman on residential housing supply, NIMBYism, and economic growth:

Nick Timiraos: Why White House Economists Worry About Land-Use Regulations: “White House economic advisers have produced a steady diet of white papers this year…

…Their latest target: land-use restrictions. Housing is growing less affordable because there’s more demand for rental and, increasingly, owner-occupied housing, but little new supply…. [Some] cities make things worse with zoning and other land-use restrictions that discourage production, said Jason Furman…. Peter Ganong and Daniel Shoag… examines the slowdown in income convergence… more common in states during the 1960s and 1970s regardless of constraints on housing supply. By the 1990s, states with more constrained housing supplies saw far less income convergence than those with less constrained housing supplies…. Only high-income workers can afford to relocate to those high-productivity cities that have tighter land-use regulations…