Start with her achievements: same as our friend Herbert Meyer, she forecast with near-date accuracy the economic collapse of the Soviet Union based on economic reading alone. It was a bold prediction, made two years before it actually happened, in 1987. She was criticized for it, but she knew she was right and doubled down. In 1990, she wrote a book called The Coming Soviet Crash: Gorbachev's Desperate Pursuit of Credit in Western Financial Markets." The book drew naysaying, too. They called her an extremist...except that she was right.
She also warned about the currency meltdowns in emerging markets that occurred through the 1990s. Her 1998 book Money Meltdown is a classic of the genre, explaining how these disruptive events occur and can occur ‐ coming out right when Mexico, Asia, and Russia were going down. Someone with this kind of forecasting firepower alone is worth paying attention to. She's exactly the kind of person you want at a place like the Fed.
So naturally, she's already being subject to all kinds of criticism from the conventional-wisdomers and swamp aficionados ‐ same people who told her she was nuts for forecasting the Soviet meltdown. They criticized her then and got left with egg on their faces, so off they go, criticizing her nomination again now. Not even the real leftists, such as Paul Krugman or maybe Joe Stiglitz have weighed in yet, but they will. The current ones holler at Shelton for pointing out the value of a stable money standard, such as gold, something she has stuck to her guns about ‐ defying even Milton Friedman.