In the end, we agreed on a test of our contrasting hypotheses: who Trump would select as the next Fed chair. I argued that if Trump re-upped Janet L. Yellen, or chose someone similarly mainstream, that would support my argument. If Trump nominated some rich golfing buddy or a similar hack-level appointment, then the other scholar would feel vindicated.

Wednesday my colleague emailed to concede defeat, because of this Wall Street Journal story:

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The White House has notified Federal Reserve governor Jerome Powell that President Donald Trump intends to nominate him as the next chairman of the central bank, according to a person familiar with the matter, a move likely to combine continuity on interest-rate policy with perhaps a lighter touch on financial regulation.

My Post colleagues Heather Long and Damian Paletta render a similar assessment of the Powell pick:

Powell, a Republican, is widely viewed as a safe pick who is unlikely to make any dramatic changes to the Fed’s handling of the economy at a time when the stock market is soaring and unemployment is at a 16-year low. Unlike some of the other candidates Trump considered, Powell has been supportive of Yellen’s policy of slowly raising interest rates, which have been at historic lows for nearly a decade as the Fed looked to help the economy recover from a massive recession. Trump has expressed interest in keeping rates low as he aims to stimulate the economy and get more Americans higher-paying jobs.

The Financial Times’ John Authers observes that Powell does “not appear to have diverged from Ms. Yellen’s in any significant way at any point since he joined the board, and he has never dissented from a decision of the Yellen Fed.” That seems pretty continuous with what the Fed has been doing in recent years.

And that, it would appear, is that. Much like his Afghanistan decision, Trump will accede to mainstream preferences on the really important things even as he makes a hash of almost everything else.

I’m not right all that often, and so I should just take my victory lap and let this rest. But there’s something about this decision that is just so Trumpian that I can’t let it go. Because my respected colleague has half a point. While Powell seems like a sound choice, there was an even better option: re-upping Janet Yellen for another term.

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Since Yellen had served only one term, a Trump renomination would have been the logical move. But as Maggie Haberman and Binyamin Appelbaum wrote in the New York Times this week, Trump’s decision-making process was, um, not great:

One White House official described Mr. Powell as a “safe” choice as well as the candidate who most closely fit Mr. Trump’s penchant for filling top jobs with characters from “central casting,” as he has often put it. … In looking past Ms. Yellen, Mr. Trump would be breaking with longstanding precedent. Every Fed chairman in modern history who completed a first four-year term was nominated for a second. The last three Fed chairmen were nominated for new terms by a president of the opposite party. And Mr. Trump has praised Ms. Yellen’s performance: During her four years, unemployment has fallen sharply, inflation has remained low and the economy is growing. “You like to make your own mark,” Mr. Trump said last week, by way of explanation.

It’s not much of an explanation, to be honest. And as my colleague Sebastian Mallaby cautions, there are questions about whether Powell can handle the challenges and threats that Trump poses — things that Yellen already knows how to manage pretty darn well.

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Powell will likely work out just fine. But there is a part of me that looks at this decision the same way Trump handled the decertification of the Iran deal. That was a similar move, in that it was less catastrophic than met the eye but still radically suboptimal.

As Trump decisions go, choosing Powell is far from his worst one. But it’s frustrating when there exists an obvious, superior choice on the menu and the president of the Unites States abstains from that option.