Too many people are confusing capable with good policies. Tillerson is clearly one of the most intelligent and capable people in the cabinet. Obviously this is a low bar.

That doesn't mean his policies aren't awful. His lack of staffing is not incompetence, it's policy. He wants to massively reduce the influence of the state department.

jesus just saw his earlier tweet about "his wonderful time in las vegas" and meeting great doctors and victims!

Once more with feeling: based on what?

Too many people are confusing c-suite jobs with being capable. I mean, weren’t the CEO and CIO from Eauifax capable? They managed such a large organization and such!

So this is the MMT thing where trivia about the workings of the financial system are repeated with great seriousness in the hopes of tricking people into thinking they're deeply meaningful. The Fed buys and sells government debt to manage interest rates because that's it's job. The Treasury, on the other hand, sells huge amounts of Treasury securities in weekly auctions *to pay for things* because Treasury's job is to finance the American government, which it does by collecting taxes and selling government debt.

This is another big snoozer, like all accounting. It proves nothing. There's no way to demonstrate, purely from rearranging equations, that the offset to net government saving doesn't come in the form of reduced foreign holdings. Indeed, given that other countries have vast holdings of US government debt, that's a natural place for redemptions to come from.

Right, and this is dumb. No one holds dollars to pay their taxes. (Your taxes are mostly paid by your employer. Your employer is a fairly sophisticated business who could dollars or Swiss francs or yuan or whatever on the spot market to meet payroll tax obligations.) People hold dollars to buy stuff or as a store of value. Do tax obligations contribute to the value of the dollar? Likely so, but its use to access the USD payment system to process transactions is hugely important too. The proof is cryptocurrencies, which have no tax or inherent value, but still have market value due to their exchange function.

The fact that some people have to be the most capable and intelligent?

Further to my point, the whole idea behind being a capable senior executive is that you are able to delegate responsibility to effective department heads. People trying to argue that someone is a capable leader that has not staffed the heads of the teams that report to him is talking nonsense.

People seem to have this idea that CEOs are given the job of being the leader because they, among all the middle management, are the best at writing memos or scheduling team meetings or something. People move up corporate command structures because they instill confidence in the people above them and staff the positions below them with reliable soldiers.

His excessive focus on fake news makes me uncomfortable. What's his end game with that? I fear he will eventually try to roll out regulation or an executive order that targets the media. It just seems like he's conditioning people, mostly his base, to accept that the media is not to be believed.

*Hey simulation person, send me with cuse to the Bernie sim please.

Nah, ~all CEOs of large corporations are going to be reasonable "capable", with capable in this context meaning generally competent, not ******ed, etc.

That kind of thinking put trump into the White House

Totally this. Tillerson is either competent because his job description is to **** the SD or he is an incompetent f'ing moron. At least based on his results so far.

I love how Trump campaigned on getting rid of lobbyists and then loaded his cabinet with CEO's.

Middlemen are so wasteful.

Uh, no.

First of all, it is true. I'm not saying all CEOs are amazing leaders, geniuses, etc, but an IQ > 100 and a general ability to function in the world are necessary conditions for becoming CEO of Exxon.

It's amazing that the tone-deafness has been there since day one ("loved ur holocaust memorial, super fun! xoxo") and nobody's worked on it with him.

So he can tie his shoes without setting his apartment on fire, I’ll give you that. But the question was't whether he was a drooling moron or not, it was if he was a capable leader.

Please note, you have offered literally no evidence for anything, just loads of question begging.

One problem with the Tillerson being one of the smartest in the administration argument is that the bar is so low. Rick Perry is in the cabinet for example.

How does S.Miller avoid all scandal and controversy?

I don't know, but maybe its because he seems to be totally motivated by ideology. Trump and many others in his inner circle are consumed by wealth and greed...and that can lead to scandal. Miller doesn't appear to be in the same category.

I'm not particularly trying to write an academic paper on the subject here, and I'll note the evidence you've presented for your view is also zero.

"But the question was't whether he was a drooling moron or not, it was if he was a capable leader."

What the question is is not really that cut and dried, as many people ITT are saying many different things.

If I'm picking people to run the state department, I believe random CEO >> random person. If the argument you think we're having is different than this, then we have miscommunicated.

White supremacy is too ordinary.

Are we playing Bieber or Trump here?

That assumes they have the same vision for the role the organization is supposed to play.

But I'm not sure why I let myself get dragged down this rabbit hole. My original frustration was because I think making hay out of some random comment Tillerson made about Trump is really stupid because there are so many other important things we should be focusing on re: the Trump administration.

Y understanding was that Tillerson worked his way up to the top of Exxon.

In other words, he wasn't just some Ivy League business grad that was handed the job, he worked through the company over years, proving himself as a capable administrator is a massive, complex company. Yeah, I am ok with that guy administering an organization for me over most other people, all things being equal.

Only took him 14 years of employment to become a general manager. My goodness, what deft capability.

So, uh, who is a capable leader, then? It's not like Exxon was a startup that you could jump to the top in two years. There's not a magic sorting hat that proves people are capable.