| Time | Text |
|---|---|
|
Fed Accountability Questioned
00:03:32
|
|
| What's important here, John, is there's a lot more at stake than just this one regulation about residences and mortgages. | |
| It has to do with whether and to what extent the Fed is actually accountable to the President of the United States. | |
| That's what's at issue. | |
| What's striking to me about this is that the Fed has been around since 1913. | |
| This question has never really been asked at this level, much less answered. | |
| For all these years, this country, we've pretended as if there's such a thing as an independent central bank, and everybody knows what that is. | |
| Well, there's another word for independence that is unaccountable, right? | |
| Independence sounds great. | |
| Unaccountable sounds bad. | |
| Well, the Fed's unaccountable. | |
| They've not been held to account for any outside audits in its entire history. | |
| Any political intervention is widely seen by financial markets as something like a catastrophe. | |
| You're risking the nation's financial stability and so on and so on. | |
| But, you know, in the end, we are governed by this document called the Constitution. | |
| And we're a nation of laws. | |
| And the Constitution has three buckets. | |
| It has a judiciary, has a legislative branch, and an executive branch. | |
| In the org chart of the federal government, printed by the federal government that everybody agrees is true, the Federal Reserve is under the executive branch and reports to the president. | |
| You can see it. | |
| The org chart is very clear about that. | |
| You can say it's independent. | |
| Well, is that just sort of a norm that we just have a hands-off policy? | |
| Well, this is what I was going to ask, because, you know, certainly in the judiciary, precedent is hugely important and impacts a great many things. | |
| Is that the case here? | |
| Because clearly, as you've outlined, the precedent has been, you know, independence. | |
| So we don't really know in a constitutional sense what that means. | |
| And you'd think that we did, we would know, but we don't actually know what it means for there to be an independent agency under executive department. | |
| So what's exciting about the times in which we live is that we're finally getting answers to these questions. | |
| The Supreme Court's been very clear up to now that the president is in charge of the agencies, executive agencies. | |
| So let's just say the Department of Labor or USAID or Department of Energy, Department of Agriculture, or HHS, they can, in fact, fire employees. | |
| Now, five years ago, we didn't know the answer to this question, right? | |
| I mean, I think we've had these discussions for a while. | |
| We didn't actually know whether the president was really in charge of executive agencies. | |
| The Supreme Court, in a series of cases, has been very clear the president is in charge of executive agencies, but we know Trump. | |
| That's great. | |
| But now Trump is taking on the great question of American life, which is the status of the Federal Reserve under the law. | |
| That is an unanswered question. | |
| So this is a taboo topic. | |
| We've never been here before. | |
| No president since 1913 has taken on the Fed the way Trump is taking it on now. | |