ABSTRACT
The Council of Economic Advisers was created by the Employment Act of 1946 and received its mandate from that Act. The emergence of the CEA as the vehicle for economic analysis was in accordance with the grain of history which produced the Brownlow committee of 1937 and its recommendation that “the President needs help.” The creation of a formal Troika structure brought explicit collaboration of three sets of staffs and regular meetings of their principals to analyze and assess economic trends. Monetary policy is set by the Federal Reserve Board, and then fiscal policy is tailored to that monetary policy and to the economic projections of the Troika, often after a great deal of consultation with the chairman and staff of the Federal Reserve Board. The reason, according to Gardner Ackley, was that the entire economic team was trying to orchestrate a campaign to push through surtax, and they felt that the Federal Reserve had jumped the gun.
