Trump takes the next step in Judy Shelton’s nomination to Federal Reserve board

President Donald Trump on Thursday officially nominated two picks to the Federal Reserve Board, including conservative scholar Judy Shelton, nearly seven months after first announcing his plans to fill the central banks’ last two remaining board seats.

In July, Trump had announced his intention to nominate Shelton — who has broken with the President over his views on immigration and holds views in opposition to most mainstream economists — along with Christopher Waller, who currently serves as the executive vice president and director of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

The President’s selection to fill the two remaining vacancies comes after he failed to advance two picks last year: conservative commentator and campaign adviser Stephen Moore and former Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain, who both eventually withdrew from consideration.

Shelton did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.

Shelton previously served as the US executive director of the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development after Trump appointed her early on in his presidency. She resigned from that position in July 2019. In 2017, she became chair of the National Endowment for Democracy after having served as vice chairman from 2010 to 2014.

Shelton has publicly supported Trump’s views on currency and is a critic of the Fed, which Trump has made a habit of denouncing over interest rate hikes in a break with presidential precedent.

“The Fed is not omniscient. They don’t know what the right rate should be,” Shelton told the Financial Times in May. She told the Washington Post in June that she “would lower rates as fast, as efficiently, as expeditiously as possible.”

She also echoed Trump’s rhetoric when she wrote in a 2018 paper for the libertarian think tank Cato Institute that “we make America great again by making America’s money great again.”

Shelton has long advocated for returning to the gold standard, the belief that the price of gold is stable and would make the dollar less susceptible to inflation or other volatility. The United States abandoned it in 1971 and the majority of economists in America believe that reviving it would be disastrous for the US economy.

“It’s supposed to be a dependable store of value,” Shelton said in an interview on CNBC in July. “It’s not supposed to be just another government policy instrument to try to engineer outcomes. And what we’ve seen is central banks trying too hard to do just that, and they’ve engineered us right into a negative rate scenario, which completely undermines the idea of having faith in the future.”

But in a divergence from Trump’s professed views, Shelton once praised undocumented immigrants to the United States as “economic heroes” and “entrepreneurs” — a position at odds with the President’s rhetoric on migrants from Mexico and elsewhere in Central America, who he’s described repeatedly as “criminals.”

In a September 2016 interview on the Reuters podcast “The Exchange,” Shelton said that she spent years teaching at a business school in Monterrey, Mexico, and found that those who migrate to the US “are not the least educated,” instead describing migrants as “venture capitalists.”

“They are risk takers and admirable for that,” Shelton said at the time. “They are also the venture capitalists for their own country because they send all of that money back home and then they have relatives buying real estate, improving housing. So they’re truly the economic heroes.”