Scott Horsley

I forgot about that.

Yeah.

I mean, they ultimately wound up cutting interest rates to about zero when the pandemic hit and unemployment took off.

But before that, there was lots of criticism from President Trump that the Fed wasn't keeping interest rates as low as he wanted.

Politicians generally want very low interest rates to goose the economy, even though if that might mean

higher inflation in the long term.

That's precisely the reason that when they set up the Federal Reserve, they put some insulation around it to keep the Fed from being swayed by that kind of political pressure.

Of course, President Trump has sort of ignored those guardrails as he has so many others, and he has threatened to fire the chairman of the Federal Reserve.

He has tried to fire another member of the Fed's governing board.

He has really tried to put his imprint on interest rate policy.

And this weekend, we learned that that extends to the Justice Department launching an investigation of the Fed over cost overruns at its headquarters renovation and testimony that Fed Chairman Jerome Powell gave about that project before a Senate committee last year.

That really seemed to be the straw that broke the camel's back for Jerome Powell.

He has really tried to avoid getting dragged into a fight with the president all of last year, and in fact, going back to the first Trump administration.

But when the Justice Department came after the Federal Reserve with these criminal subpoenas, Powell had had enough.

And he came out on Sunday in an unusually strongly worded video statement and said,

The Trump administration is trying to influence and intimidate us into cutting interest rates, and we're not going to do it.

Well, we should say, first off, I guess that Trump told NBC he was not involved and didn't even know that the Justice Department was conducting this probe.

But there's not much question that Trump has used every weapon at his disposal to try to sway the Federal Reserve's decision-making, even though, as I said, it's supposed to operate independently of that kind of political pressure.

There certainly have been cost overruns on the headquarters project, but I've not heard any credible suggestion of any kind of wrongdoing associated with that.

That's because