A Primer On The Federal Reserve's Independence

President Donald Trump has been loudly critical of Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell for years now. Since January, the President has accused him of playing politics by keeping interest rates high. Trump has also threatened to oust Powell — which would mark an extraordinary shift away from the independence of the central bank. Today from our friends at The Indicator from Planet Money: a short history of the Federal Reserve and why it’s insulated from day-to-day politics; how the Fed amassed a ton of power in recent years; and a Trump executive order that took some of that power away. To access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline http://plus.npr.org/throughline. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:11Rund Abdelfatah?

  Hey, everyone. Rand here. Since January, President Trump has pressured the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates. But so far, the numbers haven't moved. And that's by design. The Federal Reserve is supposed to be an independent government agency, meaning that the Fed makes decisions about monetary policy without Congress or the White House interfering. But that doesn't mean the Federal Reserve is completely free from influence. Earlier this month, President Trump announced his list of potential candidates to succeed current Chair Jerome Powell, whose tenure is up in May next year. Some people are concerned that Trump's pick could compromise the central bank's independence. Today on the show,

• 0:55Rund Abdelfatah?

  we're bringing you a short history of the Federal Reserve, why its independence is so important, and what President Trump has tried to do to influence it. It's from our friends over at The Indicator from Planet Money. Enjoy.

• 1:15Speaker 02

  President Donald Trump has gone from threatening to oust Jerome Powell, the Chair of the Federal Reserve, to saying he has no intention of firing him.

• 1:25Speaker 03

  And this is not the first time Trump has raised this possibility of interfering with the Fed or even firing Powell. Trump has been lowly critical of Powell for years now. And since January, the president has accused him of playing politics by keeping interest rates high.

• 1:41Speaker 02

  And though so far Trump hasn't taken any action to dump Powell, every time Trump's anger at the Fed chair flares, markets quiver and economists start flipping out because they say the Fed has to be independent. It has to focus on keeping the economy healthy, and that process must be free from politics and pressure. It needs to just focus on what's right for the economy. But why exactly? Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Darian Woods.

• 2:12Speaker 03

  And I'm Wayland Wong. Why is the independence of the Federal Reserve so sacred? Why does just the idea of Trump interfering with the Fed send economists into a tizzy?

• 2:22Speaker 02

  Today on the show, a primer on the Fed. From the Indicator podcast, we have three ways of looking at that question for you today. We'll look at what the Fed does, why its independence is so important, and one quieter step President Trump has taken to influence the Fed this year.

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• 4:10Speaker 02

  The Federal Reserve, the US central bank, has two big goals: keeping prices stable and jobs plentiful. The Fed can do things like change interest rates to address inflation. Raising interest rates can bring down prices, but can also make new mortgages more expensive. And it can put people temporarily out of work. Economist Carol Abinder of the University of Texas told us these can be unpopular moves for a politician.

• 4:36Speaker 05

  If their goal is to get elected in a few months or even in a few years, they're not going to worry about the long-run consequences of their policy actions. So, lower interest rates, maybe they boost the economy right now, but in the longer run, maybe lead to inflation.

• 4:54Speaker 03

  The Fed has more credibility. Investors and the public generally believe it'll try to do what it takes, and that's important in getting the job done.

• 5:03Speaker 02

  And when we say the Fed is independent, we don't mean it's completely separated from democracy. While a president can't say, "Lower interest rates" when they feel like they're getting too high, the Fed is accountable to the public in other ways.

• 5:16Speaker 03

  Right. The president appoints the members of the Federal Reserve Board. The Federal Reserve's goals: low inflation and high jobs, are set by Congress, and the agency is accountable to Congress.

• 5:28Speaker 02

  Last summer, Republican Senator John Kennedy grilled Fed Chair Jerome Powell. I've got two seconds. So, when are you going to lower interest rates?

• 5:36Speaker 06

  I'm today not going to be sending any signals about the timing of any future actions.

• 5:42Speaker 02

  As much as politicians might want to control interest rates, they can't. And that's thanks to an accord between the Treasury and the Federal Reserve in 1951. In the US, inflation was running high after World War II and during the Korean War. But the Fed had a problem. It was effectively controlled by the Treasury Department, which was led by the president's Treasury Secretary. And that got in the way of the Fed doing its main job: influencing the money supply, keeping inflation down, aka monetary policy.

• 6:13Speaker 05

  So, what's called the Treasury-Fed Accord of 1951 is when the Fed finally was granted independence to be able to conduct monetary policy the way we would think of it today.

• 6:26Speaker 03

  That didn't mean that presidents didn't try to influence the Fed. Like, think of Arthur Burns, Fed Chair in the 1970s.

• 6:33Speaker 05

  Most famous would be Richard Nixon when he was pressuring Arthur Burns for looser monetary policy to try to help his reelection chances.

• 6:42Speaker 02

  Lyndon Johnson also twisted the screws on his Fed Chair at the time. And through the 1970s and 80s, a consensus started to emerge among economists. The job of central banks to bring down inflation was a lot easier without politicians getting in the way, trying to pressure the lever down. And in return for more autonomy, central banks could be more transparent about their decision making.

• 7:07Speaker 05

  As economists came to recognize the benefits of transparency and of independence, it kind of became more accepted and more part of the culture at the Fed and even the culture at central banks around the world.

• 7:23Speaker 03

  The Bank of Japan, the Bank of Mexico, and the Bank of England became independent in the 1990s. The European Central Bank was built as independent from day one. And the evidence suggests that independence works to control inflation.

• 7:37Speaker 02

  Carolina Garriga is a political science professor at the University of Essex in the UK. Carolina and her co-authors' research finds that countries with more independent central banks have lower levels of inflation. But like all good social scientists, she's quick to note that correlation doesn't always equal causation.

• 7:57Speaker 07

  It's not causation, but it's a pretty strong correlation that holds across time from the 70s to two years ago and across different kinds of governments.

• 8:07Speaker 02

  A very strong correlation that is definitely pointing in a direction and winking.

• 8:13Speaker 07

  Exactly.

• 8:14Speaker 03

  Carolina also talks about countries that have eroded their central bank independence.

• 8:19Speaker 07

  You can see central bankers being fired and then inflation spiking. I mean, I'm from Argentina and I can give you many examples.

• 8:26Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 8:26Speaker 07

  And this has happened not only in Argentina, it has happened in Turkey, it has happened in Hungary, when an attack to central bank independence becomes public. You can see these effects in inflation going up.

• 8:38Speaker 02

  Carolyn Abinder at UT Austin says in the US, the consensus grew that central bank independence was a good thing, and this led to a norm. Presidents were letting the central banks do their thing. Until the 2016 election, when Trump started publicly and loudly criticizing the Federal Reserve. That continued into his presidency. He appointed Fed Chair Jerome Powell, but started making these public swipes against him from 2018. This was a major shift in the president's relationship with the Fed.

• 9:10Speaker 05

  There had been a norm for many years that the president wouldn't, well, I don't know which presidents had Twitter, but they wouldn't go on Twitter or something like that, ranting about the Federal Reserve. So that was a shift in kind of what was seen as acceptable for a president to do.

• 9:28Speaker 02

  Carolyn says these comments are revealing.

• 9:30Speaker 05

  You frequently have presidents who disagree with what the Federal Reserve does. They almost always disagree on the side of, we should have looser policy, we should have lower interest rates. So it shows you, well, if we had left monetary policy in the hands of the president, we would have had more inflation.

• 9:50Speaker 03

  That said, Carolyn says the public does want accountability. Like, how did we even get such high inflation? What went wrong? How can we avoid that happening again?

• 9:59Speaker 05

  The Fed should give them that kind of accountability, should be transparent about the mistakes they made and what they've learned and what they might change.

• 10:07Speaker 02

  Carolyn does think there is a grain of truth there in the frustrations that might lead someone wanting a politician to strong-arm the economists. Think about what we've been through, the high inflation, the pandemic, and then the global financial crisis before that. The Fed was scrambling to help, of course, and that meant expanding its role and taking on unconventional new action, like buying up tons of mortgage securities and bonds.

• 10:34Speaker 05

  You can see why there is kind of more calls for more oversight of the Fed, or calls to constrain it if it's seen as maybe going beyond what its original intentions were.

• 10:48Speaker 02

  That raises the question, how did the Fed become so powerful? Here with me now is Gina Smilek, reporter for The New York Times, who wrote a book called Limitless: The Federal Reserve Takes On A New Age Of Crisis. And the key thesis of this book is that, for better or for worse, the Fed has amassed a huge amount of power over the economy.

• 11:10Speaker 08

  That is correct.

• 11:11Speaker 02

  And there's this key moment at the peak of the early pandemic chaos, where this becomes really clear.

• 11:19Speaker 08

  Right. This is the morning that the Fed rolls out a bunch of details on several market rescue programs that it is setting up that it has never set up before. And then Jerome Powell goes on a webcast with the Brookings Institution, and the host of it says, you know, what are the limitations here? You know, what are you capable of? And Chair Powell replies.

• 11:40Speaker 06

  But there really, there's no limit on how much of that we can do other than that it must meet the tests under the law.

• 11:47Speaker 02

  There is no limit.

• 11:48Speaker 08

  There is no limit. And I think that's kind of a mic drop when it comes to the world of central banking, because he's basically saying that here at the Fed, we have this ability to sort of, at least temporarily, print money out of thin air. And we can use that to really safeguard every important market.

• 12:05Speaker 02

  A mic drop moment, indeed. All right, so let's start with why the Federal Reserve tries to be politically independent.

• 12:11Speaker 08

  So if you had a Federal Reserve that was super linked up with politicians who are worried about reelection, they might really not focus on the inflation side of their mandate.

• 12:22Speaker 02

  And did you come across any stories that reveal how Fed Chair Jerome Powell personally considers his role?

• 12:29Speaker 08

  Yeah, so Chair Powell will often say things like, this is a matter for Congress to decide, this is a matter for politicians to decide. A great example of how Chair Powell was really trying to keep the Fed limited and within its lane. You know, there had been some appetite on the Hill to see the Fed get into municipal lending, leading up to the pandemic. You know, we saw some Democrats saying, back when the financial crisis hit, banks got bailed out, but Detroit didn't get bailed out. And how is that fair?

• 12:57Speaker 09

  Why isn't it equally important to ensure that state and local governments have access to credit?

• 13:03Speaker 06

  You know, we don't have authority, I don't believe, to lend to state and local governments. I think we tried.

• 13:09Speaker 09

  That could be a tool.

• 13:12Speaker 06

  I don't think we want that authority. I think we want, I think that's something for Congress to do.

• 13:17Speaker 02

  So these ideals of the Fed and these ideals of Jerome Powell are all very well in what we call beast time. But let's think back to the early days of the pandemic, early 2020.

• 13:28Speaker 08

  I think it's easy to forget now, but at the same time that we were all trying to figure out how to do work from home and how to adjust to maybe some job losses in our families and those kinds of challenges. The markets were trying to adjust to a world where we didn't know if people would ever come back to offices. And we didn't know which government debt was going to be safe. And what this resulted in was just a run for the exits. People wanted cash. They thought cash was the only thing that was safe. And they were selling everything else. And so we saw huge breakdowns across a whole range of markets that usually are very safe. And this is the kind of thing that's going to hit not just Wall Street, but almost certainly Main Street if it continues.

• 14:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, but as Jerome Powell has a habit of saying, there are no atheists in a foxhole. You know, sometimes you change your mind in a crisis.

• 14:12Speaker 08

  Yeah, and I think sometimes you change your mind when not changing your mind is going to cause the worst problem.

• 14:18Speaker 02

  And when we're talking about the Fed pushing past its previous boundaries, it seems to me there are two key dates with two key sets of policies that forever changed what the Fed was capable of. So tell me about that first Fed bundle of programs in late March of 2020.

• 14:36Speaker 08

  So we get to March 23, 2020, and we see the Fed jump into a bunch of markets that it hasn't previously touched. It rolled out a corporate bond buying program and a program that was sort of promising to help out Main Street companies.

• 14:53Speaker 02

  So not just the big multinational companies, but I guess aimed at midsize or even small businesses?

• 14:59Speaker 08

  Yeah, and I describe this in my book, as somebody described it to me, which is it was really about covering the waterfront. They wanted to make sure that they were trying to service sort of every place that you might see. Borrowing and lending breakdown in the economy.

• 15:15Speaker 02

  Jerome Powell appears on TV pretty soon after.

• 15:18Speaker 10

  And joining us now in a rare and exclusive live interview is Jerome Powell.

• 15:21Speaker 02

  He's on the Today Show to explain this package. Is that unusual for a Fed chair?

• 15:27Speaker 08

  It's pretty unusual. The Fed chairs tend to stick to the more sort of business oriented publications and TV shows. I think they were trying to reassure the country that they were really bringing out the big guns.

• 15:40Speaker 10

  So you're saying, no, it's not a blank check, but yes, you're prepared to spend an unprecedented amount.

• 15:47Speaker 06

  We certainly are.

• 15:48Speaker 02

  And then it seems like that had an effect. It calmed the markets. But even that huge response didn't totally resolve all the jitters. So let's go through that second big fire hose in early April 2020.

• 16:01Speaker 08

  So April 9th, 2020 rolls around and the Fed rolls out a big new package that includes a municipal lending program. And it also adds in junk bonds to the Fed's bond purchase program. And those are two pretty uncomfortable things for the Fed to do. The Fed has openly said that it doesn't want to be involved in the municipal bond market. And, you know, the junk bond market is also pretty unattractive because it's this big market of people who took on, in some cases, a pretty significant amount of risk. And no central bank wants to feel like they're bailing out the junk bond market. But the concern is, you know, these are big companies. If you leave this market completely closed, you know, if it fails to operate the way it should,

• 16:42Speaker 08

  if it becomes impossible for people to issue debt at rates that they can afford to manage to stay in business, you could have a huge round of layoffs just because this market is flailing.

• 16:52Speaker 02

  And so that day Jerome Powell crosses another one of his kind of personal lines. He seems like he's kind of recommending things for the politicians to do.

• 17:01Speaker 06

  In many cases, what people really need is direct fiscal support rather than a loan. And what we can do is loan. So there's a, there's a big need for fiscal policy.

• 17:10Speaker 02

  So tell me about that.

• 17:12Speaker 08

  Yeah, so what he's saying basically here is, dear Congress, we're trying to help people, but people need money to keep their businesses open or money to make up for the fact that they're not going to work, et cetera. And we've just had the CARES Act pass. But the CARES Act was always meant to be pretty short term. And this is Jerome Powell being clear that the Fed cannot solve every problem here. Congress needs to act.

• 17:36Speaker 02

  The Fed does, in general, try to stay in its lane, or at least operate under the powers given to it by the Federal Reserve Act. But it is enormously powerful and has been lending to all kinds of areas of the economy. And in doing so, it was kind of picking winners and losers. That is not apolitical. So now it finds itself firmly in political crosshairs. Gina Smilek, thank you so much for talking to The Indicator.

• 18:03Speaker 08

  Thank you for having me.

• 18:04Speaker 02

  After the break, an executive order that lays the groundwork for more presidential control.

• 18:10Speaker 00

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• 19:33Speaker 02

  So ideally, the Fed's decisions on interest rates should be independent. That's where we started when Trump was inaugurated in January. But since then, a lot has happened. President Trump has signed more executive orders than any president this early in the term. He has been spilling the presidential ink. And as we know, many of these orders will be tied up in court for the foreseeable future. But we want to focus on this one executive order as it relates to the Federal Reserve.

• 20:03Speaker 03

  Trump signed an executive order in mid-February to make sure agencies follow the president's priorities. It put tighter control on how these agencies spend and regulate. And it applied to agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Federal Reserve.

• 20:19Speaker 02

  Now, there's one big asterisk here. The executive order says it only applies to the Federal Reserve's role in safeguarding the financial system. It doesn't apply to the Fed's raising and lowering of interest rates to fight inflation and protect jobs, you know, monetary policy. Catherine Judge is a law professor at Columbia University.

• 20:38Speaker 11

  There is an effort to signal, look, we don't want to mess with monetary policy. So it seeks to provide a little bit of calm and status quo maintenance.

• 20:49Speaker 03

  Catherine says it's widely accepted that less independent central banks end up with higher inflation. Research backs this up.

• 20:57Speaker 02

  The evidence is less clear about the effects of having the Fed's bank supervision and regulation role under the grip of politicians. And so it makes sense that President Trump specifically carved out the Fed's monetary policy as staying independent. But the big question is, how this division would work in practice?

• 21:16Speaker 03

  It also raises questions over how the Fed might intervene when something goes wrong. For example, when Silicon Valley Bank ran into financial trouble in 2023, the Fed stepped in to lend it money. Would those decisions now be subject to White House review?

• 21:32Speaker 02

  Catherine says the problem with this approach is if the White House begins to meddle in some functions of the Fed, it would undermine other decisions made by the individuals at the Fed.

• 21:41Speaker 11

  So the core challenge is you have these individuals who are playing multiple roles. And how credible is it that they are going to maintain independence on one front? And not others.

• 21:53Speaker 03

  Fed Chair Jerome Powell has been fielding more questions lately over whether his decisions on interest rates will be influenced by Trump.

• 22:01Speaker 02

  Here's what Powell told a House committee in February about potential executive branch interference.

• 22:06Speaker 06

  What we're going to do at the Fed is keep our heads down and keep working, wait to see what new policies emerge, and try to make a thoughtful, sensible set of policies on our part once we understand the implications of those.

• 22:21Speaker 02

  Classic Powell, keeping his head down, doing the work.

• 22:24Speaker 03

  Please don't bother me.

• 22:25Speaker 02

  I would not expect anything less from him. You know, we reached out to the White House to ask how this division would be managed. According to a senior administration official, the Office of Management and Budget will oversee all the Fed's regulations not related to monetary policy. We also asked if it could erode the credibility of the Fed's decisions to raise or lower interest rates. The same statement said no, and to, quote, "include that accusation in your story would not be accurately reporting the executive order."

• 22:53Speaker 03

  Jerome Powell's term as chair expires next year, so if Trump wants to go in a different direction on monetary policy, that would be his earliest opportunity.

• 23:02Speaker 02

  Unless he decides to take unprecedented and possibly illegal actions sooner.

• 23:11Speaker 02

  The original episodes from The Indicator were produced by Corey Bridges, Brittany Cronin, and Julia Ritchie. They were engineered by Sina LoFredo, James Willetts, and Kelly Moon. They were fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. Case Concanon is the editor of The Indicator. Follow us wherever you get your podcasts.

• 23:35Speaker 04

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