I already signed an online petition. You should as well: Nominate Paul Krugman.

…for the post of treasury secretary, to replace the outgoing Tim Geithner, Obama could afford to make another bold choice: Paul Krugman.

Krugman would be tough to oppose on any substantive grounds. He has a Nobel Prize in economics (also the John Bates Clark award for best economist under 40). The New York Times columnist is probably the best-known living economist in the United States, and perhaps the world.

Krugman has been right about the major problems facing our economy, where many other economists and much of the business press have been wrong. A few examples: he wrote about the housing bubble before it collapsed and caused the Great Recession; he has forecast and explained that large budget deficits and trillions of dollars of “quantitative easing” (money creation) would not cause inflation or long-term interest rates to rise; and that the “confidence fairies” would not reward governments that pursued austerity in the face of recession…

via Why Paul Krugman should be President Obama’s pick for US treasury secretary | Mark Weisbrot | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk.