Nathan Tankus

speaker

348 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Feb 2025 last heard 17 Jul

Nathan Tankus’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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

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Odd Lots · Lev Menand and Nathan Tankus on Why Fed Independence Is Now Hanging by a Thread · 17 Jul 2026 podcast

I think, you know, as we'll get into in more conversations about, quote unquote, history and tradition.

there's this indication of this longer legacy.

And we, both Lev and I, have huge problems with this invocation.

But nevertheless, it is true that there's these institutions, the First and Second Bank of the United States, the Bank of North America that were founded, that had various things that insulated them from presidential or even at times congressional control.

And there's, of course, a huge history of these kinds of institutions, which people now look back on and call central banks, even though that wasn't the conception of the time in Europe.

And economists are very familiar with those histories because they're proto-central banks.

So that's what's important in their minds.

And economists – if you're theorizing in the 1950s or 1960s, if you're Buchanan or any of these big economists –

it doesn't occur to them to like, maybe I should read administrative lawyers in terms of thinking about how these things are structured.

Economists always have this weird thing where they're talking about things that we refer to, but it's like a different thing in their models and they're just named the same.

Like a central bank in an economics model is very different than a central bank in actual legal reality.

One of the things that I've really emphasized for a number of years about this point

Up until these recent Supreme Court decisions, as a legal matter, the Federal Reserve had the weakest protections against removal of any of the independent agencies.

And if you thought that economists cared at all about administrative law, that economists actually thought that these legal protections mattered –

You would think that they would advocate for the strongest removal protections being at the Fed.

But no one ever cared because it was all this norm thing.

In March 1951, two people handshake.

They release a press release called the Fed-Treasury Accord.

And that's good enough for economists because for economists, it's all this sort of like vague credibility stuff rather than legal institutions.

I think what Lev brings up really highlights that like economic motivations and a belief that you're dealing with very advanced economic issues has primarily been the driver for these multi-member independent commissions.

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