To my amazement, the Financial Times is reporting:

Randall Kroszner, an academic economist and former member of President George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), was interviewed last week for the vacant position on the Federal Reserve's board of governors. […]

Richard Clarida, a professor at Columbia University and expert on monetary policy, who had been top of the list, is understood to have slipped down the pecking order. Mr Kroszner teaches at Chicago on money and banking, international finance and financial regulation. He has mainstream views on monetary policy and is not known to be associated with any special approach.

The FT isn’t digging very deeply here. Randy has published widely in mainstream journals (see his impressive publications list here), but much of his work on monetary policy and institutions respectfully challenges mainstream thinking. I especially like his paper “Free banking: the Scottish experience as a model for emerging economies”. (It makes up for his earlier Scotland-skeptic paper with Tyler Cowen, “Scottish Banking before 1845: A Model for Laissez-Faire?”, which I have criticized elsewhere.) Randy's book with Tyler, Explorations in the new monetary economics (Blackwell, 1994) contains anything but “mainstream views on monetary policy”. (I reviewed that book in the Journal of institutional and theoretical economics 152 (1996).)

I’d say more, but I wouldn’t want to lessen Randy’s prospects for being nominated and confirmed by criticizing -- or by endorsing! -- his work. Should he get nominated, the confirmation hearings could be quite interesting.