Bob Murphy

In practice, if the people who are running the Fed on a day-to-day basis, if they decide to go rogue and deviate from the script, they have a lot of power.

And so I do think you see these squabbles.

And as with a lot of things, I think the issue with Donald Trump is he talks very frankly.

He doesn't pepper his words and use nice euphemisms.

He just kind of says the situation.

So it's not that much of a departure from how things have always been.

It's just Trump is more frank about it.

Well, sure.

So great question.

And I would say for your viewers who haven't seen it, Besson, he says I'm trying to remember the exact.

It was definitely last year at some point, but he had this document that he put out where he was like challenging or he was saying we need to restore this.

the independence of the Fed and in the sense that they need to return to their original calling and that they have too much discretion right now in the sense of they're being able to deviate from these things.

And it was a very well-written document and they made a lot of plausible points.

So, I mean, cynics just dismissed it and said, oh, he's just doing that because the Trump administration wants to tighten the screw.

But regardless of the motivation, what they produced was a very coherent, reasonable critique of Fed policy.

But just pointing out things that

The Fed dabbling with mortgage-backed securities and all that kind of stuff, that was inaugurated after the financial crisis.

As of the year 2004, the idea that, oh, if housing is in trouble, maybe the Fed will come in and just start buying a trillion dollars of mortgage-backed securities.

That would have been unthinkable.

People said, no, you can't do that.