Bob Murphy

And that's what's saying, that's crazy.

Just to give one example, I remember a lot of my academic colleagues were so shocked when the financial crisis hit and then the Federal Reserve

in the fall of 2008 started announcing they were paying interest on reserves.

And so I knew a lot of my colleagues were stunned because, oh, no, the Fed should be providing liquidity right now.

Why would they be paying banks to not make loans to people?

And, oh, the mystery is solved, though, when you realize the Fed is owned by the banks and it was just, you know, giving them money.

Like that was an extra flow of income.

Like then all of a sudden the mystery is solved, right?

So I think that, yes, the Fed has always been political.

In fact, the ostensible independence, that was only...

formally established after World War II with the Treasury-Fed Plaza Accords, right?

So it was just a matter of course, it was written into what it was supposed to be doing, that the Fed's function was to help the Treasury finance the World Wars, for example, right?

So this idea of independence is a relatively recent claim.

And I think it's largely just, again, to make everything look like it's above board when in fact it's not.

Another example,

when the Fed was doing all those rounds of QE was also, you know, during the Obama years when they had four years in a row of trillion dollar plus deficits, right?

So I don't think that was a coincidence that the Fed decided, hey, we want to load up on treasury debt right when the federal government was issuing so much of it.

So again, this idea that they're independent, you know, Walmart is an independent company, but it's not that their CEO has to get approved by Congress, right?

So that doesn't really, really work.

So there is that element, but again,