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Good morning.
Fortune Senior Editor-at-Large Shawn Tully filling in for Sheryl today. When Donald Trump announced yesterday that he was nominating Stephen Miran to fill a vacancy on the Fed’s board of governors, you could be forgiven for asking, Who?
The 41-year-old millennial, who has chaired the Council of Economic Advisors under Trump 2.0, is hardly a household name, even if you run in economics circles. But as I detailed at the beginning of the summer in Fortune for an in-depth profile, Miran has become Trump’s top pro-tariff ideologue.
As of this time last year, I wrote, “Miran was a virtual unknown in both political and economic circles. He’d worked in a variety of investment firms and never been an academic. He got on Trump’s radar by authoring a series of papers that matched the mindset of the ascendant, pro-tariff contingent in the Republican presidential campaign, including a now famous 41-page treatise Miran himself nicknamed ‘the Mar-a-Lago Accord’ that discussed a number of possible solutions to closing America’s yawning trade gap.”
That got him the nod as chair of the CEA, a position typically held by prestigious names plucked from top universities (Ben Bernanke, Jason Furman, Austan Goolsbee) or longtime Washington operatives (Jared Bernstein), or both. As I mentioned, “None of the dozen noted economists I interviewed for this story had ever met Miran, or heard of him before his ascension to head CEA. In a couple of cases, they fumbled his last name as “murr-Ann,” as frequently do TV and podcast pundits (right pronunciation: ‘My-run’).”
As my sources told me, Miran is a rarity, a highly trained economist who knows all the jargon, has absorbed the peer studies, brings intellectual heft, and makes a logical-sounding case for Trump’s stunningly contrarian game plan. “To say the least, it’s a relatively small pool of PhD economists who are economic nationalists. That’s a blinding reality. But Steve is one,” says someone outside the administration who knows him.
You can read the whole story and hear from Miran himself, in the story here. But given that Miran, if confirmed, will be sharing the table with Trump nemesis and Fed chair Jerome Powell, one thing is for sure: CEOs, CFOs, and anyone watching the economy closely will be hearing the name Stephen Miran quite a bit this year.
Shawn Tully
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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