Lev Menand

speaker

1,295 appearances 6 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2025 last heard 17 Jul

Lev Menand’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Odd Lots · The Fight Over Fed Independence Just Got Taken To a Whole New Level · 12 Jan 2026 podcast

JP Morgan, Bank of America, they're the ones actually issuing the money in circulation that people are using.

And it's their expansion of the money supply or contraction that is affecting the rate of inflation and all of the macro.

Economic variables.

What the Federal Reserve is doing when it conducts monetary policy is changing the incentives and constraints on the collective balance sheet of the banking system to expand and contract.

And the main way we adjust those constraints is through the overnight interest rate.

But the overnight interest rate itself is not what's important.

It's about the decisions of JP Morgan and Bank of America loan officers to expand or contract the amount of deposits in circulation.

And there are a lot of other government tools that affect that.

And we have chosen for good reasons to focus on the overnight interest rate as the primary tool for adjusting the rate of expansion and

Contraction of the money supply, but obviously capital requirements, liquidity requirements, supervisory expectations all have an influence on the balance sheet of the banking system and the rate at which it expands and contracts.

And so the idea that we could split these functions and that we would just have this bank regulator that isn't affecting macroeconomics.

Economic conditions is fanciful.

We might hope to create a bank regulator that is not adjusting its regulatory and supervisory posture in an effort to influence macroeconomic conditions, and that that mandate sits only with an overnight interest rate authority.

But we would have to recognize that this other organization.

That has the regulatory and supervisory responsibilities could perhaps even more effectively influence macroeconomic conditions by adjusting its posture.

And certainly in this sort of environment where we're trying to insulate from executive influence.

Um, the rate of expansion of the money supply.

Um, you would not achieve that if you handed over to the White House regulatory and supervisory policy uh and left in an independent agency just the overnight interest rate policy.

Uh, you'd have quite a struggle between those two bodies.

There's a lot of other issues with splitting them up, but I think there's sort of the bottom line point is the money supply.

Showing 421–440 of 1,295 · page 22 of 65