Bob Murphy

And then it was the next week that Powell came out announcing about the criminal investigation.

So to me, yes, it clearly looks like they are at odds on that issue.

Just more generally, if you looked at the Fed as just like a foreign country,

It's holding more treasury securities right now, $4 trillion and change than the next five or six countries put together.

China only has $686 billion or something like that.

So in terms of just the power the Fed has and the ability to sort of stick it to the federal government and what they want to do, they announced a $1.5 trillion military budget for next year, right?

They clearly need to have deficit financing.

They need the Fed to be on board.

If the Fed all of a sudden decides not to accommodate that, that could be very expensive.

Just one last consideration.

If right now the outstanding debt is like $38 trillion.

So just having the treasury yield curve shift up by one percentage point across the maturities, that's an extra $380 billion in annual interest expense.

So that right there, I mean, that's more than a lot of countries, their total budget.

So I'm just saying that, yes, I think the White House, given its plans and what they wanted to do, all things considered, needed the Fed to be on board.

And this is their way of making sure that happens.

Right.

And so, yes, with all this stuff, it's it's theater that.

So I understand why people are concerned about the sort of, you know, heavy handed moves of the Trump administration, like looking into Lisa Cook and things like that.

And that, yes, it's it's violating the normal decorum at the very least.

But the idea that the Federal Reserve is this independent thing and you've just got a bunch of bean counters who are drawing supply and demand curves and taking first derivatives on the chalkboard.