Adam Posen

The president or the administration is trying to intimidate a hardworking bureaucrat just trying to do the right thing.

And as the chair accurately said, it's a power gambit by the president and his team to force the Fed to set interest rates and set monetary policy in ways contrary to their judgment of what's best.

I think they do.

If you weaponize the Department of Justice on people who you happen to disagree with, it's contrary to the rule of law and it leads to bad outcomes.

And even if the court cases don't hold up,

It means that people get harassed, get intimidated.

Specifically with respect to the Fed and independence, there is this tendency to have it as this abstract thing.

Independence isn't abstract here.

Independence, in this case, is what we call operational independence.

So it's like you have an airline pilot or a surgeon.

You don't want the patient or their family or the passenger on the plane telling them how to run the plane or do the operation while they're doing it.

You want them to be accountable.

You want to say, you get me from here to there.

You take out my damaged appendix.

And you want there to be accountable if they mess up after the fact.

You can sue for malpractice.

You can do whatever, or you can just simply complain.

But

You don't get involved in the technical nitty-gritty of trying to make things work because it backfires.

When an elected executive tries to put pressure on the head of a central bank, you end up with higher inflation because they get them printing money at times when it's not justified for purposes to pay off things.