Trump taps Kevin Hassett to head National Economic Council

(Reuters) -President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday tapped Kevin Hassett, who was a key economic adviser in his first term, to chair his National Economic Council, which helps set domestic and international economic policy.

Hassett headed the White House Council of Economic Advisers, which advises the president on economic policy, from 2017-2019.

After stepping down from the CEA, Hassett had a brief return to government to help with the COVID pandemic. In the early days of the pandemic, he painted a more dire picture of the likely repercussions than other White House aides were doing at the time.

Currently a managing director at the Milken Institute and the Brent R. Nicklas Distinguished Fellow in Economics at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, Hassett holds a doctorate in economics from the University of Pennsylvania.

He was John McCain's chief economic adviser in the 2000 presidential primaries and a senior economic adviser to the campaigns of George W. Bush in 2004, McCain again in 2008, and Mitt Romney in 2012. Hassett had previously been research director at the American Enterprise Institute and was a senior economist at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve.

Hassett and co-author James K. Glassman drew attention in 1999 for their book "Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting from the Coming Rise in the Stock Market," which was published not too long before the dot.com bubble burst. The two, who just a year earlier had said the Dow Jones Industrial Average could top 35,000, said in their book that the Dow could hit 36,000 in roughly five years.

The Dow closed above 35,000 for the first time in 2021. On Tuesday it closed at 44,860.31.

Generally a conservative economist, Hassett in an op-ed essay in the New York Times in 2012, in the aftermath of the financial crisis and the Great Recession, addressed what he called "a crisis in long-term unemployment" and called on policymakers to craft a comprehensive "re-employment policy."

(Reporting by Steve Holland and Leslie Adler; additional reporting by Jasper Ward; Editing by Scott Malone and Edwina Gibbs)