Epoch Times - Is the Fed Really Independent? | Jeffrey Tucker
Aired: 2025-09-06
Duration: 03:33


=== Fed Accountability Questioned (03:32) ===

[00:00:01]  What's important here, John, is there's a lot more at stake than just this one regulation about residences and mortgages.
[00:00:09]  It has to do with whether and to what extent the Fed is actually accountable to the President of the United States.
[00:00:18]  That's what's at issue.
[00:00:22]  What's striking to me about this is that the Fed has been around since 1913.
[00:00:28]  This question has never really been asked at this level, much less answered.
[00:00:35]  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.
[00:00:46]  Well, there's another word for independence that is unaccountable, right?
[00:00:54]  Independence sounds great.
[00:00:55]  Unaccountable sounds bad.
[00:00:57]  Well, the Fed's unaccountable.
[00:00:59]  They've not been held to account for any outside audits in its entire history.
[00:01:04]  Any political intervention is widely seen by financial markets as something like a catastrophe.
[00:01:10]  You're risking the nation's financial stability and so on and so on.
[00:01:13]  But, you know, in the end, we are governed by this document called the Constitution.
[00:01:20]  And we're a nation of laws.
[00:01:22]  And the Constitution has three buckets.
[00:01:25]  It has a judiciary, has a legislative branch, and an executive branch.
[00:01:31]  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.
[00:01:47]  You can see it.
[00:01:47]  The org chart is very clear about that.
[00:01:50]  You can say it's independent.
[00:01:52]  Well, is that just sort of a norm that we just have a hands-off policy?
[00:01:57]  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.
[00:02:06]  Is that the case here?
[00:02:07]  Because clearly, as you've outlined, the precedent has been, you know, independence.
[00:02:13]  So we don't really know in a constitutional sense what that means.
[00:02:17]  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.
[00:02:27]  So what's exciting about the times in which we live is that we're finally getting answers to these questions.
[00:02:33]  The Supreme Court's been very clear up to now that the president is in charge of the agencies, executive agencies.
[00:02:40]  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.
[00:02:50]  Now, five years ago, we didn't know the answer to this question, right?
[00:02:53]  I mean, I think we've had these discussions for a while.
[00:02:55]  We didn't actually know whether the president was really in charge of executive agencies.
[00:03:00]  The Supreme Court, in a series of cases, has been very clear the president is in charge of executive agencies, but we know Trump.
[00:03:08]  That's great.
[00:03:09]  But now Trump is taking on the great question of American life, which is the status of the Federal Reserve under the law.
[00:03:19]  That is an unanswered question.
[00:03:21]  So this is a taboo topic.
[00:03:24]  We've never been here before.
[00:03:26]  No president since 1913 has taken on the Fed the way Trump is taking it on now.