Trump’s Fed pick Judy Shelton called the central bank ‘almost a rogue agency’ in 2011

President Donald Trump’s Federal Reserve nominee Judy Shelton said in 2011 that the central bank was “almost a rogue agency” in the US government and had become a “behemoth” that couldn’t be trusted with oversight of the dollar.

“Our government is promising so much to so many and at the same time we let the government control the value of our money and all of that would really go against the grain with our Founders — who did not see it as the government’s task to supply everything to everybody,” she said.

“They saw the government’s task to be to protect private property and that’s why they wanted limited government because they knew,” she added. “It’s just the nature of having power that causes people in power to abuse the privilege. I think we’re now at a point where we have to ask if we can even trust government to regulate the value of our money.”

Shelton, a gold standard enthusiast, made the comments in a 2011 interview with the the Atlas Network which “increases global prosperity by strengthening a network of independent partner organizations that promote individual freedom and are committed to identifying and removing barriers to human flourishing.”

CNN reported last week that Shelton is facing an uphill battle to win Senate confirmation after three Republicans said they were undecided on whether they will support her nomination. Republicans have one more seat than Democrats on the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee; if any Republican senator votes against her nomination, it would result in a tie that would likely end her nomination.

Shelton’s nomination came after two Trump picks, Stephen Moore and Herman Cain, withdrew from consideration amid controversy before being formally nominated.

She has a doctorate in business administration from the University of Utah and was a fellow for many years at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Trump appointed her to be United States Executive Director of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development early in his presidency.

In her confirmation hearing, Sen. Patrick Toomey, a Republican from Pennsylvania, pressed Shelton on her calls for the Fed to cut interest rates even further to prevent the US dollar from strengthening in value relative to other currency. Trump has repeatedly made that argument in attacking the current chairman, Jerome Powell, who he named to the post in 2017.

The White House issued a statement in defense of Shelton and a second nominee, Christopher Waller, after the February 13 hearing.

“The nominations of Judy Shelton and Christopher Waller are not being pulled,” said Judd Deere, a White House spokesman in a statement. “Both were in front of the Banking Committee today and the White House expects both to be confirmed by the Senate to the Federal Reserve.”

Shelton did not respond to a CNN request for comment.

Shelton has long advocated for returning to the gold standard, which the United States abandoned in 1971. She’s argued that the policy would make the dollar less susceptible to inflation or other volatility — a view the majority of US economists believe would be disastrous for the US economy.

Shelton backed away from her previous support of the gold standard in her Senate hearing, suggesting that it would simply be valuable for policymakers to look at it for “historical use.”

But her comments in 2011 painted the Fed — the world’s most powerful central bank, then overseen by George W. Bush appointee Ben Bernanke — in a suspicious light.

“We can appreciate the intent of those congressmen who are currently trying to put some kind of limit on the Federal Reserve,” Shelton said in 2011. “They sense that the Fed is out of control. It’s almost a rogue agency in that it has become so dominant, so powerful, a force that financial markets are really paralyzed unless they know what Ben Bernanke is thinking.”

Presidents and other politicians have historically refrained from appearing to interfere in Fed decision-making for fear of upsetting financial markets, but Trump has upended that tradition, openly and habitually trashing interest-rate policy and fretting that the US economy is being overly constrained.

That view echoes what Shelton, a 2016 campaign adviser, said in her 2011 interview.

“For an agency that was created in 1913 to play a very passive role of temporarily providing liquidity,” she added. “Basically when farmers seasonally needed more money and the banks would run out of cash, then it was the Fed’s role to make sure that we could provide the cash knowing it was always backed by future productivity. Now the Fed is this, this behemoth. So I appreciate when individuals say, well, what we have to do then is start reining them in. Maybe Congress has given up its own responsibility defined by the Constitution to regulate money. We farm that out to the Fed. The Fed has gotten Potomac fever. So now we’re going to start reining them in.”