Austan Goolsbee to CEA Chair.

Austan Goolsbee is taking over for Christina Romer as CEA Chair. Ezra Klein has seven things to know about Austan Goolsbee. As Klein notes, there “are now no women with central roles in the White House’s economic process, and no obvious openings.” (Obama could help with that by nominating Elizabeth Warren to the CFPB. And the administration pushing harder on getting Janet Yellen through the Senate and onto the Federal Reserve’s FOMC would be an important achievement.)

I’m a fan of Goolsbee and I’m glad to see him take the CEA Chair. A few notes:

Finreg

Goolsbee is the person who brought Volcker to the adminstration. Reuters:

The former Fed chairman and the presidential hopeful met at a dinner on Capitol Hill in June 2007…Word got back to Obama’s campaign headquarters and to economic adviser Austan Goolsbee that Volcker was impressed with the candidate. Goolsbee jumped at the chance to get the economic legend on board.

“We don’t need the guy’s money. We want to pick his brain and see if we can get his endorsement,” Goolsbee recalls telling a campaign operative at the time.

And New York Times: “The guy’s a giant, he’s a genius, he is a great human being,” said Austan D. Goolsbee, counselor to Mr. Obama since their Chicago days. “Whenever he has advice, the administration is very interested.”

The rumors I’ve heard is that Goolsbee was very important in getting the Volcker Rule in front of the President once it became clear that Volcker was being ignored in the financial reform debates in late 2009. Without Goolsbee, I’m not certain we would have had the Volcker Rule. Rumors of course, so take it with a grain of salt.

But Goolsbee has been very energetic on getting serious financial reform: Here he is discussing the Volcker Rule the day financial reform passed. I wonder what the financial reform effort would have looked like if Goolsbee and Volcker were closer to the crafting and implementation of it.

On Not Extending The Bush Tax Cuts For the Richest Americans

His strong background is in tax policy. As Arpit Gupta pointed out to me, some of his most interesting research has been quantifying and using statistics to argue that there isn’t much deadweight loss from taxing the rich