Pod Insights Optimist Economy What The Actual Fed. About this episode The Federal Reserve is in the news constantly these days. Beyond the regular will-they-or-won’t-they question on interest rates, there are multiple legal battles with implications for the central bank’s independence, President Trump’s nominee for chairman may (or may not) get a hearing in the Senate soon, and Jerome Powell's may (or may not) leave when his term as chair ends in May. So let’s try to demystify the Fed. How does it stop bank panics? How did it make the Great Depression worse? What is a Fed Note exactly? And is the discount window a metaphor? From Glass-Steagall to the dual mandate to quantitative easing, here’s a crash course.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 Mitt Romney and Ted Kennedy were about as different as two politicians could be. The lanky businessman and the stout old senator, the conservative darling and the liberal icon. But did you know they once teamed up to tackle an elusive challenge: universal healthcare?
0:16 Speaker 01 This is a politician's dream.
0:18 Speaker 00 In season four of the Big Dig podcast, we tell the story of Romney Care and the odd couple alliance behind it. Find Mitt and Ted wherever you listen.
0:32 Speaker 01 We should include how long this took me to do it, like how many takes this is. For those of you listening, this is like take 10.
0:37 Robin Rauzi? I feel so much better.
0:45 Speaker 01 Hello and welcome to Optimist Economy. I'm Catherine Ann Edwards, economist.
0:48 Robin Rauzi? And I'm Robin Rousey, editor.
0:50 Speaker 01 On this show, we believe the US economy can be better, and we talk about how to get there, one problem and solution at a time.
1:01 Robin Rauzi? Today on Optimist Economy, we're going to talk about the Fed. So this came up because, of course, the Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, his term ends in mid-May. The president has just nominated Kevin Warsh to replace him. But I've just realized that I don't, the more I read about the Fed, the less I understand it. And so we're going to try to figure some things out so that you understand the stakes and what's going on in the months ahead.
1:23 Speaker 01 I would argue that not a lot of people understand the Fed. So like, if you don't know what's going on with the Fed, you're an amazing company.
1:31 Robin Rauzi? Because I have tried really hard in the last few days to figure it out. And like I said, the more I read, the less I know.
1:38 Speaker 01 Yeah, well, we'll get there, together.
1:45 Speaker 01 Or not, and you can just stop listening to the podcast. Like, there's lots of ways this could go.
1:48 Robin Rauzi? There's lots of options. This is what we get for trying to be like somewhat connected to the news.
1:57 Speaker 01 All right, well, do we have any announcements?
2:00 Robin Rauzi? I don't think so.
2:01 Speaker 01 Okay, well, after announcements, we do.
2:04 Robin Rauzi? Let's go straight to retcon.
2:06 Speaker 01 Straight to retcon, retroactive continuity, where we clarify, correct, and apologize. So, couple retcons. One, Carter liked the show, my co-author, who had done all the brilliant math stuff, dealing with income inequality calculations. He listened and he said he really enjoyed it. Thank God. I didn't tell him I was doing it. I thought I would surprise him, because I know he listened to the show. And then he said he liked it, and I was very happy. Second retcon is actually a little harder to deal with, which is that in the prior episode, I said that I went to London and brought home biscuits for Robin, but I actually forgot to give them to her, so I also ate them.
2:46 Robin Rauzi? I think that you're taking responsibility for that. I think that we forgot to pick them up. We left them on the dining room table, and we might be at fault.
2:55 Speaker 01 I just want to make it sure it's clear that it sounded like I was thoughtful enough to bring back cookies, but I was not thoughtful enough to make sure she got them. And then I was happy enough to consume them myself. So, I don't want you guys to get... I think this is about being honest. This show is about honesty.
3:11 Robin Rauzi? And shortbread. Okay.
3:12 Speaker 01 Oh, Andy's saying we got thousands of letters about this.
3:15 Robin Rauzi? Yeah, yeah. They all wanted cookies.
3:18 Speaker 01 Our next section is called Terms and Conditions. This one, actually, we're going to put into Terms and Conditions as opposed to retcon. But I said that Vilfredo Paredo was a polyglot, and a listener emailed us to point out that he is in fact a polymath. And a polyglot is someone that speaks a lot of languages, and a polymath is someone who is good at a lot of different things.
3:43 Robin Rauzi? In fairness, he could have been a polyglot, too. We don't know.
3:46 Speaker 01 He probably was, but that's not what I was referring to. Me, economist, neither glot nor math.
3:55 Speaker 01 Robin, did you look anything up? And also, y'all, thank you for the email. I'm saying this a little sarcastically, but I actually like, we do love hearing from y'all.
4:03 Robin Rauzi? Love that, yeah.
4:03 Speaker 01 Yeah, totally loved it. And the guy, he was, he was like, I don't know if I should say anything.
4:09 Speaker 01 You should say something. This show is only, this show is as good as y'all help us be with your feedback and comments.
4:14 Robin Rauzi? That's true. I read a sentence that used buffalo as a verb, and apparently this is a perfectly acceptable verb, but I, I did not know that you can use buffalo like to mean bamboozled or...
4:29 Speaker 01 Now I'm realizing I don't know what bamboozled means.
4:31 Robin Rauzi? Like to bewilder. The sentence example from Merriam-Webster is, "I'm not some newcomer that you can buffalo with that nonsense."
4:40 Speaker 01 Okay.
4:40 Robin Rauzi? "During this debate, I refuse to be buffaloed by a flurry of irrelevant issues." I had no idea you could use that word that way.
4:47 Speaker 01 Do you think it comes from the city or the animal?
4:49 Robin Rauzi? Uh, I don't know if it comes from either. It just says it's a transitive verb. I think it comes from the animal, but...
4:55 Speaker 01 Okay, well, listeners, prepare, because in our biggest pillcrow, we will help you no longer be buffaloed by the Fed.
5:04 Speaker 01 Merch team, if you're listening, I feel like some kind of buffalo logo is in order.
5:12 Speaker 01 With like a, "If you know, you know, don't get buffaloed." Optimist economy. Wow, it's really a wonder I ended up a economist. I'm meant for Madison Avenue.
5:24 Robin Rauzi? How much coffee did you have?
5:25 Speaker 01 A lot.
5:29 Speaker 01 We're gonna take a very quick break, and we'll be right back.
5:35 Robin Rauzi? It's time for our centerpiece conversation about the Fed.
5:39 Speaker 01 The Fed, yeah. All that enthusiasm through terms and conditions and red con. Meet the brick wall of the Fed. I think, I think that Jordan Klepper on The Daily Show put up a clip of Jerome Powell speaking. And he's like, oh, so he's the human embodiment of hold music.
6:00 Speaker 01 Let's talk about the Fed. The Fed is in the news a lot for not good reasons.
6:06 Robin Rauzi? You mean right now?
6:07 Speaker 01 Right now. The Fed is in the news a lot right now for two reasons, neither of which are good. One, we don't know what's going on with the economy. People are generally worried that we're going to tip into a recession, and that's been a worry for a couple of years. That puts the actions of the Fed front and center. And so what they say, what they do, what they're talking about, that comes up a lot. Second reason why it's in the news a lot is because the Fed is an incredibly independent institution, and Trump doesn't like that. The current chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors is Jerome Powell, who was appointed by Trump during his first term.
6:44 Robin Rauzi? In 2017, yeah.
6:45 Speaker 01 Yeah, his appointment is coming to an end, and Trump has been making political attacks and legal attacks on the Fed in order to exercise more control over what the Fed does. This is unprecedented in the degree and scope. He's targeted one Fed governor for mortgage fraud and said she needs to be fired. He's brought a federal investigation against Jerome Powell, the chairman himself, and now he's just announced his new replacement on the Fed Board of Governors. And his ability to have majority appointee control of the Fed will all rest on whether or not Jerome Powell stays on the Board of Governors after leaving the chairmanship. So what the hell does all that mean? That is what we were talking about.
7:26 Robin Rauzi? This is the first thing that I find confusing about the Fed. How is it that Jerome Powell has served two four-year terms as chairman, but he could stay on the Fed Board beyond that? Can you explain that to me?
7:40 Speaker 01 Yes. I think so.
7:45 Robin Rauzi? Real-time fact-checking, please in the background.
7:48 Speaker 01 Real-time fact-checking. Someone pull up Wikipedia. An expert's talking.
7:54 Speaker 01 All right, the Federal Reserve has a Board of Governors. So, no, in the beginning, there was money. No.
8:01 Robin Rauzi? Yeah, I mean, I kind of feel like that with the Fed.
8:06 Speaker 01 We have a Federal Reserve system. We will talk about, we'll get there in a minute. But the Board of Governors is the head of this system that sits in DC. And then there are regional branches that are distributed geographically throughout the United States and have their own territory that they cover. The Board of Governors is truly a board of seven people. Six governors and a chairperson. The governors are appointed to 14-year terms. The chairperson is appointed to a four-year term. They're appointed by the President, they're approved by the Senate, and then, once they get appointed and approved, there is very little power the President has over them. And as we're learning, it's not clear he has the ability to fire them. They're an independent institution.
8:48 Speaker 01 So, the reason why Powell can stay is that Jerome Powell was appointed to the Board in 2014 as a governor with a term that would run through 2028. While he was serving that term, he was appointed Chairman of the Federal Reserve by Trump in 2017. If you were on the Board and you became chairperson, like Powell did, you can return to the Board and fill out your term as governor. Nobody's done that for a long time. Most of the time, they get done with the chairpersonship and they're like, "I'm out." But you can fill out your term. And then, like, it's also really weird, like, if you leave your term early, the person that replaces you fills out your term and doesn't start a new one. I mean, I've told people for a while, this is probably how we want the Supreme Court to work.
9:32 Speaker 01 Like, they have age limits, they have term limits.
9:35 Robin Rauzi? Meaning, they, the Fed.
9:36 Speaker 01 They, the Fed. The Fed Board of Governors, like, you know, it's a very apolitical board, and it's shielded from political influence through their independence and not being able to be fired, which is what Trump is attacking. But the fact that it's every 14 years, it's going to be off with predictable presidential cycles, and then of course...
9:51 Robin Rauzi? They're staggered, the 14-year terms?
9:53 Speaker 01 They're fairly staggered. Trump has had more appointees... Than usual because his two terms are separated by another term. So that means more people will come up and then someone just quit. So that's the Board of Governors. They meet like twice a month. They go over Fed stuff.
10:10 Robin Rauzi? It's not, yeah, it's not the other board that we think of that sets interest rate.
10:16 Speaker 01 They oversee the operation of the regional banks. They, you know, monitor the economy. They look at like the balance sheets and they basically review what's going on at the Fed, which we haven't said what's going on at the Fed yet. But I just want to be really clear. They shouldn't be confused with the Open Market Committee. The Federal Open Market Committee is, or the FOMC. Those are the meetings in which the governors plus the president of the New York Fed, plus the presidents of a rotating set of regional feds meets to determine what to do about interest rates.
10:49 Robin Rauzi? Right.
10:50 Speaker 01 And set monetary policy.
10:51 Robin Rauzi? Yeah.
10:52 Speaker 01 This is, so it has, it's like, is it, okay, question from production. Is this confusing on purpose?
11:00 Speaker 01 You know, yeah, so I think it would help to go back to understand what the Fed does and why we need the Fed. It would help to go back like to the beginning.
11:08 Robin Rauzi? Exactly. I knew it.
11:11 Speaker 01 So creatures came out of the slime.
11:13 Robin Rauzi? Yeah, exactly.
11:13 Speaker 01 And they wanted to consume things that they couldn't produce on their own.
11:19 Robin Rauzi? And so they created capitalism.
11:21 Speaker 01 Fast forward to fiat currency. Okay, so the Federal Reserve was created by the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. And the reason why the Federal Reserve was created was because we had a ton of banking panics. And banks at the time in the US, you know, in the 1800s, you had very few consolidated or large banks and you had thousands of very small banks that served a very small geographical area. Well, if a bunch of people make a run on the bank in the sense that they just want to get the money that they've deposited out of it and the bank doesn't have that money, this creates a panic and the bank has to close and nobody gets their deposits back.
11:59 Robin Rauzi? We call this the.
12:01 Speaker 01 It's a wonderful life.
12:01 Robin Rauzi? It's a wonderful, it's a wonderful life.
12:03 Speaker 01 Yes, exactly. You know, the bank has your like quote unquote money, but it doesn't have your actual money.
12:11 Robin Rauzi? Your actual dollar bills, yeah.
12:12 Speaker 01 If too many people come in and demand their actual dollar bills and the bank doesn't have enough, it's a run and the bank folds. And if enough banks do that, it's a panic because. You hear about a bank folding in another town and so you rush out to your bank to get your money and it's a kind of a domino cascading effect of bank panics. And there were a ton of panics throughout the 1870s or throughout the 1800s into the early 1900s. And the panic of 1907 was particularly bad.
12:40 Robin Rauzi? Yeah.
12:41 Speaker 01 So, the idea of the Federal Reserve was that they were going to create a new way for banks to have liquidity by having this special, not currency currency, called the Federal Reserve note. And when banks need money but don't have it, like in a panic, they can use the Federal Reserve notes they have to get access to cash. I don't know if that makes any more sense. It actually took me, I would say, a solid half decade to figure out what liquidity was. Like, no matter how many times somebody said it, I was like, "I still don't get it."
13:16 Robin Rauzi? That should have been our term and condition.
13:18 Speaker 01 Yeah. It's really just like cash.
13:20 Robin Rauzi? It's cash, yeah.
13:21 Speaker 01 Yeah, so, I mean, liquidity is your ability to convert your holdings into cash. So, you're walking down the street with your best friend. I come up and I give you both $10,000. Congratulations, here's free money. Your friend is in the middle of buying a house, so she puts that towards the down payment towards the house and gets a slightly better mortgage rate. You don't have a house and don't want to buy one, so you take your $10,000 and you put it into the stock market. Well, a month later, I run into you both again and say, "Actually, it's not free money. I need my $10,000 back." Your friend can't access the money. She's put the cash into a relatively illiquid asset in which it's not easy to necessarily get the $10,000 out. You can't.
14:03 Speaker 01 You sell your stocks, you get the, you know, as much as you value you have of it, and you can sell your stock and quickly get liquidity. So, a lot of times what happens, when things go south for banks, they don't have enough liquidity. They truly just don't have cash on hand. So, we start the Federal Reserve Bank with the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 in order to stabilize this very decentralized banking system that we have and prevent panics and bank runs. And is incredibly successful.
14:33 Robin Rauzi? Does it prevent them or does it just respond to them?
14:35 Speaker 01 No, it's like if there is a run on the bank and there's a worry about cash, they can borrow from the Fed discount window. You really just have to stop the first bank run in order to prevent a panic from occurring. And the way that you stop a bank run is like having a source of liquidity for banks that allows them to lend as much as they were before, but still have the ability to meet, you know, an excess demand for cash.
14:58 Robin Rauzi? Can you explain the window?
15:00 Speaker 01 The window, it's just-
15:02 Robin Rauzi? Is it like a bank window, like it's like a metaphoric?
15:06 Speaker 01 It's a metaphoric window.
15:07 Robin Rauzi? Bank window, okay.
15:08 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's really just, the window is what they called it when it was the Fed to the bank as opposed to to a customer. I think it did start as an actual window.
15:18 Robin Rauzi? Yeah, you would actually go up to the, you would go from Pasadena up to the Federal Reserve Bank in San Francisco and say, hey, I have some Fed notes. I need some liquidity.
15:31 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm.
15:32 Robin Rauzi? Help a bank out.
15:34 Speaker 01 Help a bank out. Fed window. Can I, can I, can I have some Fed notes? Can we do some Fed note trading?
15:44 Robin Rauzi? So I get some liquidity?
15:46 Speaker 01 Yep.
15:47 Robin Rauzi? Okay.
15:48 Speaker 01 Does it sound made up yet?
15:50 Robin Rauzi? Well, how is this different from the FD, like what the FDIC does in terms of insuring deposits? And I don't understand why you needed a whole new currency to do it.
15:59 Speaker 01 The FDIC didn't exist yet.
16:01 Robin Rauzi? Okay.
16:02 Speaker 01 It doesn't come around until the Banking Act of 1933, which also affected the Fed. But it's, it's not, it's not a currency, because a currency means like you can take a Fed note and like go down to your local 1913 Starbucks and buy a latte. It's not legal tender, like it doesn't work in the, in the market. You, you need this kind of quasi currency, like currency, reserve notes.
16:25 Speaker 01 Because if everything was held in cash, it would affect the value of the dollar, and cash was tied to gold. Because we're all still on the gold standard. Because we are all still on the gold standard. So the purpose of the Federal Reserve Act was to come up with a way to get resources to banks that would not disrupt the otherwise flow of credit and would not disrupt the value of the US dollar. And so they do this by creating a new, not currency, called the Federal Reserve note that they trade through the discount window. So at this point, it's all brokered through the 12 regional banks. It's not really like the Fed. We think of the Fed of the Board of Governors in DC, but the Fed in this era is really about the regional banks. They're supporting their local economies and the...
17:10 Speaker 01 And the regional banks... The regional banks are holding a fair amount of gold, but they are lending through this Federal Reserve note so that if you didn't have liquidity, instead of having to get the cash version of that, you can get the Federal Reserve note of it and still meet your deposits. I mean, the Federal Reserve, even though it's a system, it is ultimately always reactive to whatever bad thing just happened. So that's the creation of the Fed. Don't have bank panics. We've got this. Now, big old problem. They don't have a mandate, when it started in 1913, that has any type of macroeconomic consequence or purpose. It's just stop local bank panics.
17:52 Speaker 01 It's just serve local banks to prevent bank runs and make sure that we have a way of providing them with liquidity so that they don't have runs on banks and we stabilize the credit system in the US. That is all they're meant to do. But they do understand on some level, especially as they kind of like really get going in the 20s, that the rate that they charge at their discount window and the interest that they charge on their own currency as they lend it does affect broader economic activity. Hmm.
18:23 Speaker 01 The Federal Reserve system is arriving at the notion that their actions can stabilize the macroeconomy. Sorry, I'm laughing because then the Great Depression happens and they get like everything wrong. I mean, like if it's swing and a miss, it's like miss, miss, miss. And there are historians, especially economic historians, who will tell you, we only had a Great Depression because the Federal Reserve did such a bad job as the stock market crashed. So one thing that they did is that like as the economy started to slow down, they started raising interest rates, which like we know to be like the opposite of what you want. They raised interest rates like three times.
18:59 Robin Rauzi? What was the thinking?
19:00 Speaker 01 That they were trying to like control.
19:03 Robin Rauzi? Slow the planet?
19:04 Speaker 01 They were trying to control like the exuberance and the hysteria.
19:08 Robin Rauzi? Hmm.
19:09 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm.
19:10 Robin Rauzi? Huh.
19:11 Speaker 01 I mean, it's like, it's like there's an appeal of like, well, let's, let's raise interest rates.
19:16 Robin Rauzi? Let's just slow things down a bit and we'll get this.
19:17 Speaker 01 People will just put money in banks. This is like, there was a real like, if the people put money in banks and the interest rates high enough, that'll stabilize everything and then we won't be like worried about stock market returns. And that was the episode of what happened. And so much of the Great Depression was accelerated by the Fed making just incredible missteps. And actually Ben Bernanke.
19:41 Robin Rauzi? Accelerated or elongated?
19:42 Speaker 01 Both.
19:43 Robin Rauzi? Oh, man.
19:44 Speaker 01 They made it worse, they made it longer. I mean, because they, they were raising interest rates, I want to say as late as like 1931. And at this point, there's still 12 of them, right? It's the Federal Reserve system. They're not acting in coordinated, like they talk to each other, there is a DC office, but like it's not like the same type of.
20:01 Robin Rauzi? They don't all jet in for meetings, right?
20:02 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's not the same type of centralized decision-making we have now. So the Fed, as we know it, comes from the Banking Act of 1933, AKA Glass-Steagall. And Glass-Steagall does, well, I mean, it does a ton of things. But one of the things it does is it says that there's going to be an open market committee, which had been loosely in existence before, and it was going to be formalized and centralized and given the task of setting interest rates with a view to keep the economy stable. So it was actually given this like mandate of keep the economy stable, make good decisions, make good choices, Fed. What's kind of amazing is that Glass-Steagall, Glass was the senator and he was a former Treasury
20:47 Speaker 01 Secretary, and he was just like, we need to make the Federal Reserve stronger, we need to have a strong central bank. Steagall was a House member from Alabama who said that big banks are what caused this problem. We shouldn't do anything to help out Wall Street and we need to have a deposit insurance system in order to protect, just like your Main Street American. And it took incredible convincing to get the Senate and Glass on board, but it was really Steagall that came out with it. And at the time, most of the big central banks, any of the larger banks, the most people on Wall Street, as well as like the Senate Banking Committee, they all thought that it
21:28 Speaker 01 was a moral hazard scheme, that if you put deposit insurance into smaller banks, the larger banks would end up having to pay for it and the smaller banks would act irresponsibly. But Glass-Steagall sets up the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, FDIC, which is funded by bank fees that are then used to ensure deposits so that there would be no run on the banks. And then the Federal Reserve got a broader mandate to basically keep the macro economy stable.
22:00 Robin Rauzi? So it was Team A, get your act together and act more in concert with one another. But we've also created a secondary way to prevent bank panics.
22:11 Speaker 01 Yes.
22:12 Robin Rauzi? Okay. So at this point, the Fed's job is just basically keep the economy stable by setting interest rates at your discount window. Okay.
22:23 Speaker 01 And then monitor overall banking activity and lending activity so that in order, like if they're going to lend to a bank, they're going to like look at its books.
22:31 Robin Rauzi? Okay. So there's a certain amount of oversight that they're doing on banks too?
22:35 Speaker 01 Yeah. Yeah. So after the Great Depression, like the next seminal event in the Fed's history is stagflation, the inflation spike of the 1970s. And that was another one where the Fed-
22:48 Robin Rauzi? Oh, wait, so you're gonna skip 1951?
22:51 Speaker 01 Oh, the accord? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, how much history do our listeners like? World War II, the US government has to borrow an incredible amount of money to finance the war. That will disrupt all kinds of markets. It'll deal with long-term, like treasury notes in the 30-year, the two-year, the five- I mean, all of these things are going to be affected by the federal government becoming an insatiable consumer of debt in order to finance World War II production and eventually armament and shipping people overseas.
23:23 Speaker 01 They basically tell the Fed, you have to keep interest rates at 2.5%. Because if you go up, it could cost the federal government so much more money to borrow. Well, if you keep interest rates artificially low and a bunch of people get jobs, you're going to see inflation. So not only did the federal government say interest rates are going to be really low and they have to be capped at 2.5, but we're going to have wage controls and we're going to have price controls. And this is how we are going to keep inflation-
23:49 Robin Rauzi? Keep it tamped down.
23:50 Speaker 01 Yeah, a reasonable amount of control through World War II. So by 46, the wage controls and the price controls are gone, but they've basically said the Fed needs to keep interest rates at 2.5%, not because of the way it would stimulate the economy, but because how much the federal government was borrowing and because of like the market relationship between interest rates and treasury bonds. And by 1951, this comes to a pretty severe head and they sign, quote unquote, "the accord" that the Fed is free to fight inflation.
24:23 Robin Rauzi? And that's what really creates the, I mean, as you were just saying, before that, the government was telling the Fed where to set interest rates.
24:30 Speaker 01 Yes.
24:30 Robin Rauzi? And that's the moment where the Fed gets its independence from, right?
24:34 Speaker 01 It is this pivotal moment in that the Fed can't just, it's not going to be a tool of the federal government, of the President of Congress. It has to put, basically, the macroeconomy first.
24:48 Robin Rauzi? Yeah.
24:48 Speaker 01 And it kind of breaks up this idea that the federal government is the best or is necessary in that management. Okay, so big hits, we've got 1913, we're created. 1933, we get-
25:03 Speaker 01 Reorged a bit after a poor performance. 1951, we have listened to the federal government in order to make it through World War II, but now we are on our own, working on interest rate policy. And with that newfound independence, like most teenagers, we go right into some terrible decision making.
25:25 Speaker 01 The Fed of the 1960s and 70s makes some pretty incredible miscalculations about inflation. And if it is their job to manage it, they don't do a good job. There are volumes written about this period. I think, I tried to, I tried so hard. I was walking the dog today and I was just like, speaking out loud of like, trying to workshop, like, how do you explain what went wrong with interest rate policy in the 1960s and 70s? And I think what happened over this period, probably the shortest version is like, yes, they make a lot of decisions related to interest rates and inflation and unemployment. But the biggest miss is that they lose the credibility that they actually care about inflation.
26:10 Speaker 01 And it comes off this trade off of like, we're willing to tolerate some inflation to help with unemployment. And then it could not have, they could not have done this at an absolute worst time. If there was a period in which it would have been okay to show a little bit of tolerance for inflation, the 1970s was not it. You start off the decade, the US formally delinks and gets off the gold standard. By the end of the decade, we have a massive supply shock from oil and go into these like oil price wars. It quickly turns a situation from bad to worse. It gets to be like catastrophically high inflation. And the Fed comes down through Volcker, who a lot of people associate with Reagan. He was a Carter appointee.
26:53 Robin Rauzi? He's a Carter guy, yeah.
26:54 Speaker 01 And Volcker's like, yeah, I don't know what to tell you, but if we don't handle inflation now, we lose the credibility that we will fight inflation in the future. And this very painful recession happens in the United States. Essentially to correct for the Fed's mistakes, get inflation under control.
27:09 Robin Rauzi? He raises interest rates like 20%.
27:12 Speaker 01 I mean, inflation is so high and interest rates have to get high enough. And it's, it's almost like this like, proof through pain that the US economy will be well managed. And
27:24 Speaker 01 We get a lot from it. Prices stabilize and stay relatively low almost the entire history we've had since then, with the exception of this last inflation spike. I mean, that's 40 years of really reasonable prices. And in some ways, it's not the action of the Fed that helps control inflation. It's knowing that the Fed will act to control inflation that also keeps it in check.
27:48 Robin Rauzi? It's like a strict parent.
27:49 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, yeah. So all this is happening where the Fed is like in this like first person A plot. They're managing the economy. They're making choices. They're making decisions. They're learning a lot. They're growing as people. Congress occasionally tells them like, hey, remember 19, you know, what is that, 68? 78, sorry. The Humphrey Hawkins Act is in 1978. And the Fed is told via congressional legislation, we need to have stable prices, full employment, and predictable interest rates. Over time, the interest rate one like kind of goes away. And it's only in like the 1990s that you start to think of this as the dual mandate, because it's really about inflation and unemployment.
28:28 Speaker 01 But as all of this is going on, lots of countries have lots of central banks, not just ours. And we start to get this like very robust body of evidence that an independent central bank that does not answer to elected leadership or non-elected leadership is crucial to economic stability and growth and keeping inflation in check. And so it's not just our experience that shows this. It's the global experience during this time. Like if you gave elected officials and let them put their dirty little hands on interest rates, they would make them too low to juice the economy, to make people happy, to win elections, and you'd have higher prices for longer as a result.
29:12 Speaker 01 Speaking of grubby little hands, that is exactly what Trump is trying to do. And he says this is what he's trying to do.
29:16 Robin Rauzi? Oh, yeah, there's no secret about it.
29:18 Speaker 01 Yeah. But before we get to grubby little hands from the Trump administration, we still have to get through yet another calamity in our economic history, the Great Recession. So last one, Great Recession. Last one, last formative to Fed history event, Great Recession.
29:35 Robin Rauzi? So there's this thing that happened somewhere in here. And this is one of the things that I find hard to get my hands around about the Fed, which is there are these number of things that it does to stabilize the macroeconomy and that they move beyond just setting interest rates at the discount window to take all these additional steps. And I think that this is referred to often as the balance sheet of the Fed. So when does that start? I mean, it obviously is at a pretty high point during the Great Recession and again, in the pandemic recession, where the Fed isn't just setting, saying like, okay, interest rates are going to be low. They're doing other things that they think
30:16 Robin Rauzi? will calm markets, stabilize banks, stimulate economic activity, keep people in jobs.
30:24 Speaker 01 So the guy in charge of the Federal Reserve during the financial crisis is Ben Bernanke. And he has been a governor previously, but he's also an economist who specializes in the Great Depression. And he understands it like very well. And he, in fact, had said while he was a governor, the Great Depression was the Fed's fault. So this is like a moment for the ages to have spent your career studying.
30:57 Robin Rauzi? The Great Depression.
30:59 Speaker 01 The Great Depression and then to basically have one like land on your doorstep. So Bernanke is in charge of the Fed. It's 2006. The next year, home prices peak and start to slide. In December 2007 is the official start of the Great Recession. And the Great Recession is the deepest and longest since the Great Depression, which is why we call it the Great Recession. So he knows at least like some softballs here. He needs to immediately lower interest rates, which he does. And interest rates fall to zero, but there is still not enough movement in the economy. Banks have behaved.
31:35 Speaker 01 Abominably over this period. They have not done due diligence. They have almost no cash on hand. And so the Federal Reserve basically starts to buy stuff. It buys Treasury bonds and it buys mortgage-backed securities in order to get movement going through the banking system.
31:52 Robin Rauzi? Because everything is just essentially frozen.
31:54 Speaker 01 Everything is frozen.
31:56 Robin Rauzi? So in other words, the banks weren't coming to the window to be like, hey, I need more money. The banks were like, we're just going to sit here, you know, and count our non-money.
32:05 Speaker 01 Yeah, they weren't lending. I mean, they pulled back on economic activity. Like, let me just give you an example of what I mean. In the summer of 2007, I've graduated college and I am about to move abroad and I need a credit card. So I go down to the Chase Bank at the corner and I apply for a credit card. And no job, no credit history. I've been on a credit card of my parents that I'm no longer on. And these heroes give me a credit card with a $15,000 limit. Okay, so then I come back. It's two summers later in 2009. I get a job and my best friend is in grad school in Atlanta and she has just gone to
32:47 Speaker 01 apply for a credit card and they gave her a $250 limit. That is what we mean by throughout the financial system, it is just freezing up. They are not lending. They're not giving out money. And what the Fed does during this time through large-scale purchases is they're basically trying to buy stuff off of banks' books so that they'll stimulate the economy, so that they'll actually go out and move money. So they bought mortgage-backed securities and Treasury-backed securities. And this was called quantitative easing. And then when they thought the market was strong enough, they sold them again.
33:24 Speaker 01 I don't know. I mean, people debate how much it was like Bernanke's brilliance or just his grounding in history that he met the moment. I had a friend who lived in Capitol Hill at the time and he said that he was walking his dog one day and he kind of came up behind a guy who was like both walking a little like plotting, but also speaking aloud, full volume. And he realizes it's Ben Bernanke. And I was like, but did you say, listen to what he was saying to himself? It could be so important to the economy.
33:54 Speaker 01 Did he think we were going off a cliff? What did he think? I should say, I have not read Bernanke's book. I just, it was like a thousand pages longer than I was, what I was prepared for. So I haven't read his book. I'm saving it. I will read it.
34:07 Robin Rauzi? He wrote a book about the 2008 recession?
34:09 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm.
34:10 Robin Rauzi? So, but Bernanke is seen as being pretty successful in preventing that. I mean, it was a bad recession, but not turning into a depression?
34:19 Speaker 01 Yes.
34:20 Robin Rauzi? Even though it was the deepest and longest in 50 years?
34:23 Speaker 01 Uh, probably closer to like 80 years. It was definitely the worst since World War II, but the one we had before that was the Great Depression. So it's really, it's the worst recession since the Great Depression. It was probably the closest we've ever been to sliding back into one. And the other thing that happened, which Bernanke was also instrumental in doing, was that he tried to change the relationship of the Fed with the public and the outside. Like he, they started to do things like tell people what they talked about, have press, like, he started press conferences after-
34:55 Robin Rauzi? Yeah, I was gonna say, that was the era of the public statements and the-
34:58 Speaker 01 They now release what's called, quote unquote, forward guidance to let you know what the Fed is thinking about long-term. They give summaries of the Open Market Committee, release notes, and then they'll also give you their economic projections. For being somewhat inscrutable and confusing, this moves towards accountability are helpful. I mean, the Fed staff economists are truly elite. They are very good at what they do. They just want to be like in the action, providing the best information, and I would have, have loved to have been that. I am a little biased in that I would have liked to have worked for them. Still don't love the Fed as an institution.
35:33 Speaker 01 Or the fact that our economy needs one, but at the same time, our economy does need one. And what we've learned over the Fed's history is the financial sector needs to have like the threat of the strong parent in order to believe that there is stability and credibility in the US financial system. And that for all the talk of the Fed not being necessary, if they make a mistake, we all suffer. And that, to me, is testimony to the fact that we need them in place doing a good job. You know, I don't think central banks are appealing institutions, given how anti-democratic they are. In a sense, but.
36:10 Robin Rauzi? What do you mean by that?
36:11 Speaker 01 Well, I mean, it's not like we vote for them. We don't elect them. And then our elected leaders have.
36:16 Robin Rauzi? I mean, they're appointed and confirmed, right?
36:19 Speaker 01 Yeah, they're appointed and confirmed, but like I, if someone told me like, I don't know why you could like the Fed and not and then hate the Supreme Court. I'd be like, oh, no, I kind of hate it both. One of them has been successfully politically penetrated and the other one has remained quite apolitical.
36:34 Robin Rauzi? So far.
36:34 Speaker 01 So far. Also, I said that we had to get through the Great Recession. We also need to get through the pandemic, which is another economic calamity. Man, the hits just keep on coming. But the pandemic, the pandemic tees up what is going on with the Fed today really well. So you, it's, we're not in history anymore. Now we're into present day, starting six years ago. Oh, my God. But when the pandemic started, the US economy came to a sudden and screeching halt. Not in a way that could have necessarily become a depression because of deep underlying weakness revealed by the slowdown in economic activity, but essentially that economic activity was stopped for safety purposes.
37:19 Speaker 01 And then we had to turn it back on. This was in some ways the deepest recession since the Great Depression because of just how many people lost their jobs. But we also rebounded from it very quickly. It was a two month recession and we started to immediately grow out of it. By April of 2020, we were on like the front foot, growing quickly, adding a lot of jobs and so on. By 2021, we are recovering jobs, but we haven't fully recovered them. And inflation starts to tick up and it starts to tick up really quickly. And the Federal Reserve says that they don't want to risk the like very.
37:56 Robin Rauzi? Kind of fragile jobs environment.
37:58 Speaker 01 Fragile jobs environment in which we still have high unemployment. We still have people we need to bring back into the labor force by cutting it off too quickly. So we're going to tolerate a little bit of inflation until we can't anymore and hope that it's just a blip. That's because of all the crazy stuff that's happening as we're coming out of the pandemic. It's not, and they have to raise interest rates, which they start doing at the start of 2022. We are now almost four years into this conversation of can the Fed raise interest rates to successfully lower inflation?
38:30 Speaker 01 Without causing a recession. That is a question we have had for four years. And towards the end of the Biden administration, we were really close to answering it. Things looked really good. We had added jobs, the unemployment rate had fallen, it had creeped up a little bit, but inflation had fallen as well. It was under three. We were ready to go.
38:50 Robin Rauzi? Coming in for that soft landing.
38:51 Speaker 01 Coming in for that soft landing and then like, Trump take the wheel, maybe we won't do that. And he starts a contractionary economic policy that has inflationary components through tariffs, deportation, and the firing of federal workers. So pursuing three contractionary policies at the same time leads to a separate question, same one, second verse, same as the first. Is he going to cause a recession? Not like, is raising interest rates going to cause a recession, but is Trump going to cause a recession? In order to maintain like a relatively neutral position as all this goes on and to stay in a place to respond should a recession occur, the Fed has lowered interest rates a little bit from their peak, but then stopped and said that they were going to stop.
39:36 Speaker 01 So they lowered rates three times last year and then they were like, that's it until we know what the [bleep] is going on, although they didn't say it like that. Well, so-
39:43 Robin Rauzi? They said it more or less like that. Like, we want to be in a position where interest rates can go up or down depending on what happens. We just-
39:50 Speaker 01 Yeah, because if interest rates are too low and then the economy falls, you don't have much-
39:54 Robin Rauzi? You've got no tools. Yeah.
39:55 Speaker 01 Yeah. So they said, we're going to stop here. And they have been very reluctant to cut rates because they are still worried about inflation, which almost as soon as he got to office, Trump has been saying the Fed needs to lower interest rates. They're killing the economy. The economy needs to be boosted. And so he has been targeting kind of one at a time, the ability to take over the Fed. So who's this guy, Kevin Worsch? Worsch. Comes in with a Worsch.
40:23 Robin Rauzi? Kind of a, not a maybe total surprise pick, but there seems to be a general like, "Well, could have been worse."
40:29 Speaker 01 Could have been worse. I mean, the thought was like, there's more than one check on Trump here. One is that the Senate has to approve whoever he picks. And then the second is that if he picked someone that was truly crazy, the financial market would have revolted. And they want someone who's going to be stable and independent. And so if he had picked someone who wasn't going to do that, you would have seen kind of like upset in financial markets. Now, the question mark is, what will Warch be like? I mean, the guy knows what he's doing. And we have a lot of public records of how he votes on things and what he thinks about things. The question is, less so, what has he done, but will he continue to be independent in the future?
41:09 Robin Rauzi? Mm-hmm.
41:10 Speaker 01 I don't know. I think that the US is in an extraordinary position because so much of our economy rests on the Fed being independent. Yet, so much of the next appointees' success at being appointed will rest on Trump believing that he will do whatever Trump says, which means our economy is kind of hinging right now on the ability of a handful of men to successfully lie to the presidents that they will do what he wants and then go out and do what they want because they're Fed Chair. And I was like, that just seems like a gamble. And it's a failing of the system that somehow this is where we are.
41:46 Robin Rauzi? Hmm.
41:47 Speaker 01 The day after he announced him as Fed Chair, and was like, "Oh yeah, he'll be independent." He made it, like, Trump made a joke that was like, "And if he doesn't lower interest rates, I'll sue him. I've already told him that. I'm just kidding." It's like, no, you're not, man. You don't, you don't have a filter and you're not clever. Like, you absolutely told him you would sue him for lying if he doesn't lower rates. So, everything's going to come down to this Supreme Court case, which again, doesn't inspire confidence about what happens to Lisa Cook, the Federal Reserve Board Governor appointed by Biden, first black woman on the Board of Governors, who he has tried to fire and alleged that she had mortgage fraud. And our friend, Bill Pulte, at the
42:28 Speaker 01 FHA, said that she had lied on her mortgage application. And she said, "No, I didn't, and you can't fire me anyway." Her case is before the Supreme Court. And when it went up for discussion, Powell was right there next to her.
42:42 Robin Rauzi? I mean, the court watchers seem to think that she came up through that hearing pretty well, right?
42:46 Speaker 01 Yeah, they, I mean, the Supreme Court has not expressed, what's the word I'm looking for? Backbone?
42:54 Robin Rauzi? That's a word.
42:55 Speaker 01 That's a word. Independence.
42:59 Robin Rauzi? I mean, they have given Trump a lot of leeway to implement his policies. But they have seemed pretty concerned about the independence of the Federal Reserve. When even as they're letting him fire the heads of other agencies. But they're always saying in the background, but this doesn't really apply to the Federal Reserve.
43:17 Speaker 01 The Fed is different.
43:18 Robin Rauzi? Federal Reserve is different.
43:19 Speaker 01 So if the Fed stays different, the Fed stays different. This institution has been around a long time. It's not perfect. It has made mistakes, but it has also outlasted its detractors. And in the end, what makes it so successful as an independent agency is its necessity in our economy. And you can think of, if you think of the Fed as this like technocratic overlord over our economy, it's one thing, but really it's a technocratic overlord over the financial system.
43:56 Speaker 01 And it interferes much less in our lives and much more so in keeping credit flowing in the financial system. And because it's the central bank of the US, it is the most important central bank in the world. And most countries have the dollar as a reserve currency. So what happens in the US matters to everybody else. They've picked us because we are so stable and other things. So I think, I guess I just, I don't like all the interference at the Fed. I don't like having to talk about the Fed. I don't like how much we have to talk about the Fed.
44:27 Robin Rauzi? I know, I mean, yeah, I think that's like, you just kind of want the Fed to do its thing and do it well. And like, I just don't think.
44:33 Speaker 01 Fade into the background. And I don't want to think about you.
44:35 Robin Rauzi? Yeah, just fade into the background.
44:36 Speaker 01 Like, it should go back to just Wall Street and financial companies are obsessed with the Fed and no one else cares. And like, that's how it ought to be. Or maybe not. I don't know.
44:48 Speaker 01 I'm so tired of pretending like what is going on with the Fed is normal.
44:52 Robin Rauzi? Yeah.
44:53 Speaker 01 So let's, let's make sure we have a very clear understanding of the present day. The head of the FHA, Bill Pulte, publicly accused Fed Governor Lisa Cook of mortgage fraud. He has not proven it. That's part one. Part two is that the Federal Reserve Building is undergoing renovation. Renovations of a historic building on the National Mall are expensive, especially when a lot of the work takes place after the pandemic and the inflation spike. Powell, who gave a testimony in front of Congress in which he detailed the progress of the renovations to the historic building and even toured the renovations with Trump himself at one point to talk about what was happening.
45:36 Speaker 01 Now, the Justice Department is investigating Powell for lying to Congress and essentially doing some type of book cooking related to the cost of the renovation. The nominee, Fred Warch.
45:51 Robin Rauzi? I think that we just do want to explain to people that eventually what will happen, we don't know when, is Kevin Warch will have to go before the Senate for confirmation.
45:59 Speaker 01 Yeah, Warch has to be confirmed by the Senate Banking Committee, but a key Republican member of the Senate Banking Committee has said he will not vote on Warch's confirmation until Powell's justice investigation has wrapped up.
46:14 Robin Rauzi? Right, so, so Powell would stay on as chairman beyond his May 15 term limit date?
46:21 Speaker 01 Mm hmm.
46:22 Robin Rauzi? Okay, so we've given you a lot of context to absorb the news over the next couple of months, which was really my goal, was like, the Fed is in the news a lot anyway, but it's going to be in the news a lot between now and May. And I think it'd be nice to give listeners a little backstory on what the Fed is, what they do, why we, why we should care and how much we should care, I think is my concern.
46:45 Speaker 01 Yeah.
46:48 Speaker 01 Oh, question from production, do we like Powell? I don't know whether to root for him. Speaking as a general consumer of Fed news, do we like him? I don't think you need to.
46:58 Robin Rauzi? It's like liking your dentist. You just need him to be really good at his job.
47:01 Speaker 01 Exactly. The best Fed Chair and Fed system is one that doesn't have that much scrutiny, doesn't have much public fascination. We shouldn't have to care about them. They should just do their job and we shouldn't really know that much about, like shouldn't have to know that much about them. It was like that 2000, is that SNL skit from the first Trump administration where they go to a fortune teller? And she's like, what do I get from, what do I want for my birthday? Like, what do I get? And she's like, you get exactly what you want, stamps. And she's like, I want stamps? And then the fortune teller says, yeah, and you get them and say, take that Postmaster General Louis DeJoy? And she's like, why do I know the name of the Postmaster General? Like, that is how I feel.
47:44 Speaker 01 If they do a good job in their independent position, you shouldn't have to know about them. And we should have trust in institutions. So Powell, for what it was worth, was a Trump appointee and ended up being like probably one of the biggest thorns in Trump's sides in his entire professional career. So you can't always predict what's going to happen.
48:02 Robin Rauzi? Yeah. All right. That's it for the Fed. We're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back. We got two executive orders. I think of this as the word ban edition of executive orders. These came in both by email to [email protected] . First, Alex in West Virginia wants to ban the phrase "common sense" from politicians' use. And David from Wisconsin wants an instant 10% wealth tax, again for federal officials who use the term "the American people." And I get it, like especially when you hear politicians talk about policies and things you disagree with. They call them, "These are just common sense policies and this is what the American people want," and that it does great on one's nerves.
48:46 Speaker 01 So I think that this, to me, falls under what my family calls the restaurant rule, which is if a restaurant has an adjective in the title, it's not that.
48:56 Speaker 01 Like if it's called quality restaurant, it does not have quality. Or if it's called like luxury, like anything, if you put an adjective in any, it could apply to non restaurants. So when someone says like, this is common sense, 100% it's not. Absolutely, it's not. That's the restaurant rule they're trying to be with or not. These are great executive orders.
49:16 Robin Rauzi? Okay.
49:17 Speaker 01 Do you have a spiritual sponsor for this week? For new listeners, we don't have any actual sponsors, really not that much money. But we do need to thank our spiritual sponsors who get us through our week in our life.
49:28 Robin Rauzi? Yeah. My spiritual sponsor this week is the fact that it's 81 and sunny here. I don't want to gloat.
49:38 Robin Rauzi? My poor sister's buried under two inches of ice.
49:42 Speaker 01 Eastern seaboard, under ice is about to crack off and go to the Atlantic.
49:47 Robin Rauzi? For all the time they've said, oh, California's gonna crack off. No, it's not.
49:53 Robin Rauzi? Um, no, it's been beautiful and um, I, we've had to take a lot of long walks because you know, it has been a category five news storm for a month. So I'm really grateful sometimes that I live here.
50:06 Speaker 01 Awesome. My spiritual sponsor is Team USA Fits. I love the Olympics so much. I love winter. I love summer. I love every story. You need to give me 10 seconds of backstory on an athlete and I'm sobbing. And I'm like rooting for them like they're my own child. Like I just, I, I cannot tell you how much I love the Olympics. And my spiritual sponsor is just all the Team USA. The opening ceremony, like loved, loved our outfits. I like looked up how much it would cost for me to buy it.
50:41 Robin Rauzi? An Olympic outfit?
50:43 Speaker 01 Yeah, you can buy, I mean, you can buy the whole thing. You could buy the opening ceremony and closing ceremony outfit. And um, I mean, I've priced it out. I think, maybe not this year. Got like two kids in daycare, like this ain't the year for it. But like one year, I'm just, where'd I, what would I wear it to? I guess like, do I go to the airport wearing a full Team USA?
51:06 Robin Rauzi? LA 2028, baby. I'm excited because Coach Jackie is now doing her, is she gay or is she just an Olympic athlete?
51:12 Speaker 01 Oh, thank God.
51:14 Robin Rauzi? Just started.
51:15 Speaker 01 Thank God. I, oh man, I love the Olympics so, so much. Um.
51:22 Speaker 01 This is great.
51:23 Robin Rauzi? We also love the Olympics and that will probably be our spiritual sponsor for the next three weeks.
51:27 Speaker 01 Yeah, y'all, except the theme on the spiritual sponsor executive order front, that it is going to be a lot of events in the Olympics and we record with a lag. So this, we're like two to three weeks behind.
51:40 Robin Rauzi? We record two weeks ahead.
51:41 Speaker 01 Two weeks ahead.
51:43 Robin Rauzi? I didn't know.
51:45 Speaker 01 Let's wrap, let's just wrap this.
51:53 Robin Rauzi? The Optimist Economy podcast is edited by Sophie Lalonde. Our video production for social media is by Andy Robinson Video Consulting. If you agree with the things we say, we do post video clips on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn, and you can share those and spread the word.
52:10 Speaker 01 If you're on Substack, you can follow us there, too. You can join the Optimist chat to talk with fellow optimists. And while Optimist Economy is absolutely a labor of love, amateur love, we do have bills to pay. And if you have the means to contribute, please do so. And you can do so at optimist economy.com. We will also happily sell you a shirt, a hat, but actually, the tote bag is the one my family loves the best. I don't know about you, but my family loves the tote bag. It's a wide bottom bag, so.
52:38 Robin Rauzi? It's really good.
52:39 Speaker 01 It is, it's, it's excellent. It's weird if I bring it places. I'm like, oh, me?
52:44 Robin Rauzi? Oh, no, I carry it all the time.
52:45 Speaker 01 You carry it all the time.
52:47 Robin Rauzi? I do. I can do it. I do. And I'm just waiting, you know, someday I will cross paths with a, with a, an Optimist Economy listener.
52:54 Speaker 01 And then happens, I'll be like, what, me? No. Anyway, snap them out, we need to stop talking.
53:00 Robin Rauzi? Snap them out. Thanks, Andy. Thanks, Sophie.
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