So do we want Fed governors to stick around for 14 years or not?

King Banaian points out something that Senate Banking Committee chairman Chris Dodd said back in November about why he was holding up confirmation of Randall Kroszner's re-nomination to the Federal Reserve Board:

“There's one nomination here that would be for somebody [for] 14 years,” Dodd told reporters on a conference call. “We're frankly getting down to less than a year away from the [November 2008] election. On nominations of that length, I'm fairly reluctant.”

This is interesting. Mark Thoma and I have both expressed concern that Fed governors don't stick around very long (apart from Alan Greenspan, only one other governor has served a full 14 years since the early 1970s), making it possible for one president to appoint the entire board--which was not Congress's intention when it recreated the Fed in its present form in 1935.

Kroszner is a 45-year-old former University of Chicago economist who's been at the Fed for all of two years. My bet--based not on any inside knowledge but a quick look at his bio--is that he'll stick around for two to four more years before returning to an academic job and a spectacularly lucrative consulting career. Should he have just told Chris Dodd that?

Kroszner's term expired Jan. 31, and the Senate Banking Committee does not appear to have acted yet on his nomination (or those of two new Bush appointees to the Fed). He's still voting in FOMC meetings, though.