Nobel Prize-winning economist Peter Diamond on Monday withdrew his nomination for a seat on the Federal Reserve Board, complaining that Republicans who have blocked his confirmation for more than a year failed to understand the importance of his work on unemployment.
Diamond announced his withdrawal in an opinion article in The New York Times with the headline “When a Nobel Prize Isn’t Enough.”
“Last October, I won the Nobel Prize in economics for my work on unemployment and the labor market. But I am unqualified to serve on the board of the Federal Reserve — at least according to the Republican senators who have blocked my nomination. How can this be?” wrote Diamond, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“The easy answer is to point to shortcomings in our confirmation process and to partisan polarization in Washington,” he continued. “The more troubling answer, though, points to a fundamental misunderstanding: a failure to recognize that analysis of unemployment is crucial to conducting monetary policy.”
The Senate Banking Committee has approved Diamond’s nomination three times, largely along party lines.
But the committee’s top Republican, Sen. Rich ard Shelby of Alabama, has blocked the nomination from a vote in the full Senate.
Shelby has called Diamond “an old-fashioned, big-government Keynesian” who supported the bank bailouts and would back additional Fed stimulus to the economy.
On Monday, Shelby said President Barack Obama needed to find a better nominee.
