In response to the Trump administration’s public pressure campaign on the Federal Reserve, including the firing of Federal Reserve Board of Governors member Lisa Cook, many journalists, economists, and government officials have articulated strong defenses of central bank independence. Most emphasize how political pressure on the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates, possibly in an attempt to finance government deficits cheaply, can have severe long-term economic consequences such as high inflation and weak growth.
These articles ignore a key fact, however: the Fed, for much of its history, has not been independent from political influence. Instead, the Fed has often done the bidding of the Treasury Department by finding creative ways to finance government debt cheaply, with severe consequences for the US financial system and ordinary Americans.
That most ignore this history is not surprising. The political establishment’s response to Donald Trump’s authoritarian moves has been a rallying cry of proceduralism and a return to the pre-Trump status quo. Yet such responses do nothing to address what first brought the United States to embrace authoritarian populism. As Adam Tooze has also argued, the opposition must go beyond reciting abstract economic policy principles like central bank independence and articulate a convincing solution to people’s material problems.
One of Americans’ motivating concerns is that the economy is unfair — that it is rigged from the top down by a ruling elite that is not subject to the same rules that ordinary people are. Part of this feeling includes widespread dissatisfaction with high levels of government debt and broad distrust in financial institutions (attitudes that, incidentally, straddle both parties).
The blame for this dissatisfaction with the economy lies at least in part with the Federal Reserve. But the solution is not, as some authors imply, simply to return to the Fed of 2015. To understand the Fed’s…
Auteur: David Martin
