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.

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

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Odd Lots · Lev Menand on Trump's Attempt to Fire the Fed's Lisa Cook · 26 Aug 2025 podcast

in such a sort of unorthodox, unmoored fashion, that the main signal from that isn't that the Fed is protected, but it's that this court is going to bend over backwards for very broad conception of the president's power.

And so when you read that as a lawyer for the president, what you think is

Okay, they don't want to be tagged with concluding that central bank independence is on its face legally invalid in the United States, but they also are going to let us do what we want.

And so the thing to do is to now push on this forecase and act like it's not actually a very rigorous bar and we'll get what we want.

Because it was so surprising

That they got what they want with respect to the FTC and the NLRB.

And so there's this sense that people had after Wilcox, oh, the court is protecting the Fed.

But the real message in Wilcox that overrode that sense of protection is the court's gonna come up with reasons when push comes to shove not to pen in the president.

So the Federal Reserve is the most powerful agency in the federal government.

And alongside the Supreme Court and the White House, those are the three most powerful government bodies in the United States in 2025.

And the Fed's power has expanded dramatically since the 2008 financial crisis.

And it

Has turned its balance sheet into an active policy tool.

And that means that it is a very

Shiny prize for a president that does not want to have to go to Congress for appropriations to carry out various policies.

Here you have an infinitely extensible balance sheet.

Now, it's meant to be used to ensure stable monetary expansion over time.

But what we've seen is it can be put to other uses.

I think some of those are legally questionable.

But you can imagine a president who doesn't believe in following laws, believes in inherent executive authority with control over an infinitely extensible central bank balance sheet.

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