Bob Murphy

And he was outlining just all the new measures they were taking and things like that because people were very concerned about inflation and stuff like that.

And all the billions of dollars in loans that had been provided to financial institutions.

And they asked him, they said, Chairman Bernanke, can you give us a list of the recipients of these funds?

And he said, well, no, I can't do that because that would defeat the purpose of the program if the public knew which companies.

So, I mean, if you just stop and think about that, it's not just that the Fed was creating literally billions of dollars just with keystrokes, but they weren't even telling Congress who was getting the

So that's an extraordinary amount of power that's vested in this institution that, oh, that's just this boring thing that regulates monetary policy to trade off inflation, unemployment, when that's a very powerful engine.

And so, yes, I think Besant is...

you know, is taking the lead on trying to sort of rein them in and say, hey, this is ultimately the Fed is a creation of the federal government.

And if it just starts going rogue and doing things that are not in line with what the people wanted and what, you know, the president is there to do, the elected representative thinks is appropriate.

You know, we have all these various measures to reassert our our coordination on that.

So I think that's the tack they're taking.

And then, yes, your broader question is,

I think the U.S., as it's getting less of a footprint in the global market, that the Fed is not as powerful as it used to be.

I mean, nobody worries about the central bank of some small country somewhere influencing global affairs.

And I think over time that, yes, the Fed, even though it remains powerful compared to any other private company, but in the grand scheme that, yes, its influence is waning.

Sure, great question.

So I've been trying to be fair and balanced on this stuff, because a lot of my libertarian free market colleagues are reflexive free traders, and so am I, that I like free trade, I don't like tariffs per se, I don't like any taxes.

But the points I was making modestly was to say,

If you could get a package, and Trump's chief economic advisor, this was what he was recommending, if you can have a whole package deal where you drastically cut federal spending,

get massive income tax cuts, and then offset that partially with tariff hikes, and you had deregulation.