Yes, he’s the Taylor of the Taylor rule and, at least, he’s old enough to have had the good luck of starting his career as a PhD in economics while empirically grounded old-school Keynesian macro was still being taught in grad school, before the ‘rational expectation’ clap-trap turned into a suicide cult. Hence, his awareness that prices and wages might be, well duh, sticky. Hence his work on the Taylor rule that made his career.

But that was in the late 70s and 80s. Since then, not much, saved that he turned into a cashiered republican ideological tool, not as complete a transparent hack as Hubbard but a pretty sorry sight, nonetheless. He’s just a little bit smarter than Hubbard at being a hack.

And his recent record is rather dreadful, including blaming Fannie and Freddie for the real estate bubble when the factual, indisputable record shows extremely clearly that they were very late comers to the party and not a contributor in any shape or form to the initiation and the inflation of the bubble. This point alone is a clear disqualification, all the more that Taylor was working for the White House and not saying a word or expressing the slightest concern at the very same moment the bubble was being inflated.