Claire Jones

Well, I think, as you say, Walsh is taking the helm at a time when the Fed is under the sort of political pressure, which I think it's never really experienced.

We've seen the attempt to take legal action against Powell.

We've also seen the US president attempt to fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook over allegations of mortgage fraud, which she also denies.

And Cook remains at the Fed.

However, you could argue that the resistance of Powell and Cook and the sense in which the Fed has had some success in the courts does provide cover for Walsh in that, in a sense, he is going to have a few legal protections that we now know about that maybe we weren't quite aware of at this time last year.

Thanks, Sonia.

Hello, Mark.

Well, as one would expect, given the current environment and all of Donald Trump's calls for the Fed to cut rates and threats to fire current Fed Chair Jay Powell and his colleagues, the hearing was very much focused on whether or not Kevin Walsh can ensure the US Federal Reserve, the most important central bank in the world, can remain independent from the White House.

Walsh was pretty adamant that it could and also claimed that the president had never asked him to cut interest rates.

So Walsh is a very rich man.

We know from his financial disclosures that all Senate nominated officials have to submit that he has assets worth at least $130 million.

The big questions were exactly what are some of those assets?

A lot of what he holds is confidential.

Elizabeth Warren, the most senior Democrat on the banking committee, didn't seem to like that very much.

There were also questions from her and others as to when Walsh planned to divest of some of his assets and what he planned to do with the proceeds.

On the detail, we didn't get that much information yesterday on what he tends to do about the rise in inflation we've seen due to the rise in energy prices that's resulted from the Iran war.

What we do know is that he's very, very interested indeed on what impacts the AI-induced boom that we're seeing right now will have on the US economy.

Most Fed officials think that it's gonna

What is next for Warsh in this nomination process?

There are a lot more hurdles.