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Administration Considers Delaying Fed Chief's Exit
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President Bush and his top aides have said very little publicly about the process of choosing a new Fed chief, even though the administration started compiling names of possible successors three years ago.
For many months, the top of the list has included Harvard economist Martin S. Feldstein, 65, and the dean of Columbia Business School, R. Glenn Hubbard, 47, according to economists and political operatives on Wall Street and in Washington, including several with close ties to the administration. Both have advised Bush.
One name elevated to the top tier recently is Fed board member Ben S. Bernanke, 51, former chairman of Princeton University's economics department and Bush's nominee to become the next chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers. Hubbard was the council's chairman in Bush's first term; Feldstein held the job under President Ronald Reagan, Greenspan under President Gerald Ford.
Greenspan, Feldstein and Hubbard have been directors of several corporations. Bernanke has not.
Greenspan also ran his own economic consulting firm, Townsend-Greenspan & Co., Inc., for 20 years before joining the CEA and for 10 years after.
One obvious candidate who is both an economist and a former business consultant is Fed Vice Chairman Roger W. Ferguson Jr. He's a Democrat, though, and therefore considered a long shot.
Greenspan has drawn deeply from his business experience during his nearly 18 years as Fed chief, helping guide the economy and the markets through a stock market crash, two recessions, several international financial crises, the nation's longest peacetime expansion, the 2001 terrorist attacks and other challenges.
One lesson from the Greenspan years for many economists was not that their models should be discarded or that academics should be disqualified; rather, a successful Fed chairman be must be open and flexible.
As former Fed board member Laurence H. Meyer wrote in a recent book about his years on the Greenspan Fed, "While the chairman is willing to play by the rules in normal times, he does not hesitate to depart from them in unusual circumstances."
