More links on President Ford

Washington Post obituary

John Palmer (EclectEcon) writes:

Two decades ago, while I was visiting the University of Hawaii, I off-handedly threw out the opinion that Gerald Ford had been the best president in the history of the United States. Mac, an economic historian there, allowed that I might have been right (but also offered up Warren G. Harding).

My statement was based on the complaint that so many people had about Ford: he didn't do anything. I always replied, "I rest my case."

King Banaian at SCSU Scholars writes:

It's hard to go back and find the policies that would have whipped inflation in 1975-76 given how buggered the economy was under Nixon's wage and price control policies and the ending of Bretton Woods. There's little question that Jimmy Carter's misery index lines in his stump speech helped push Ford out of the White House (I have never thought it was just the pardon.)

At least he didn't fall back on Nixonian wage and price controls. He was, you might say, in a no-WIN situation. King also points us to an article by David Gore which quotes Alan Greenspan:

While I felt fairly close to his general point of view on economic policy problems, my initial impression was that he was not really capable of abstractly articulating a philosophy. Because of that, I sensed that he wasn't fully in control of the general framework of the policy decisions he was making on a day-by-day basis. But if you began to look at the concrete decision making process, what came through was a very sophisticated and consistent framework. Within perhaps a year, maybe even less, I was able to forecast how he would come out on individual issues with virtually zero error. I then began to conclude that this was not an accident. So, while he was not consciously or verbally in control of a general philosophy toward economic policy, he nonetheless had a fairly sophisticated view.

Greenspan found what I and others have also noticed. The more you study Ford, the more you realize that he had a better grasp of what was going on than anyone gave him credit for at the time.