Judy Shelton Joins Treasury

Blamed if it isn’t nice to see the news from the Treasury Department that monetary economist Judy Shelton has been appointed a counselor to Secretary Scott Bessent. A Treasury announcement today notes that Ms. Shelton is an author specializing in international financial and currency issues. At Treasury, it says, she “will advise the Secretary on currency policy, with a particular focus on evaluating financial conditions in China.”That caught our eye. Ms. Shelton rose to fame in 1989 with her first book, “The Coming Soviet Crash.” Its focus was on the efforts of the Soviet party boss, Mikhail Gorbachev, to pursue credit in Western markets. The Soviet Union then and Communist China today are different, but Ms. Shelton brought to the Soviet beat a willingness to take a hard look at the communist system. Strikes us as an apt attitude for her assignment covering China.When we called Ms. Shelton for comment, she declined to go beyond the Treasury’s statement. Mr. Bessent, though, can’t be the only one looking at the way the Chinese camarilla is buying gold via its central bank. Just this week, according to Kitco News, the People’s Bank of China, the country’s central bank, reported that in September it had increased its gold reserves by 21 tonnes, in what the bank reports is its “23rd consecutive month of purchases.” The return to the government of Ms. Shelton follows by several years the defeat of President Trump’s nomination of the economist to a governorship of the Federal Reserve. It was, at least to us, a shocking story, on which these columns remarked several times. It may prove, however, that Treasury is a better spot for Ms. Shelton, who in the past generation has written for the Wall Street Journal something like 60 op-ed pieces on the international beat.Treasury notes that Ms. Shelton previously served as America’s director of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and as chairman of the National Endowment for Democracy. Ms. Shelton has served as a senior fellow at the Independent Institute. She also served as a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution, where she wrote the book “Money Meltdown: Restoring Order to the Global Currency System.”With the value of the dollar having collapsed to, at one point, less than a 5,000th of an ounce of gold and still below a 4,000th of an ounce of gold, restoring order to the global currency system strikes us as a story. Mr. Trump, particularly in his first term, vowed to make an issue of China’s manipulating trade and money markets. Our own speculation is that this is a chance for him to address that promise in the last two years of his presidency.

Judy Shelton Joins Treasury

Judy Shelton Joins Treasury

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