Steinhardt Insults...Who Exactly?

Legendary hedge fund manager Michael Steinhardt, as reported by Bloomberg, thinks the stock market is going up despite all the dummies in the Bush administration.

"The intellectual quality of the people in the present administration is remarkably low in relation to how well we are doing, " he said.

Well, you would think that Steinhardt was smart enough to know that politicians have generally very little influence on the economy, and when they do exert undue influence it tends to be negative. Enough with generalities though, let's get to specifics. Given that he is talking about the state of the economy, he is most likely talking about any or all of the following people: Larry Lindsay, Paul O'Neil, Glenn Hubbard, Greg Mankiw, Ben Bernanke, John Snow. OK, maybe Lindsay wasn't great but he was fired. O'Neil was fired too, but was his intellectual quality low? Doubtful but let's concede that one. Let's move on to who has actually set our current policy. In the here and now we are basically running on policy recommendations of Hubbard, Mankiw and Bernanke. So is Steinhardt calling these guys low in intellect? Can that statement be taken seriously? OK, not all ivy league professors who write textbooks are good economists, but hardly anybody impugns Mankiw's intellectual firepower. Ditto for Glenn Hubbard and Bernanke. Is there a principled argument that these guys are doofuses? Or is this just another lame assertion of the hackneyed popular belief that GWB is an idiot. You'd think Steinhardt was more sophisticated than that.

Nonetheless, Steinhardt is a legend so let's listen to him. Let's bring back those of sufficient intellectual quality. Get me Janet Yellen, Laura D'Andrea Tyson, and Martin Baily on the horn. At least then we'll know that the good times are for real.