Tim Stenovec

But look, I think you go back and I think of J.P.

Morgan's son.

He was building the biggest yacht at the time.

People would have thought that's like the Gates or Bezos, whatever yacht you're thinking of.

I think that there was a distinction.

But I remember having an interesting conversation, oddly enough to drop a name, with President Obama, interesting, maybe 2015, about the idea that

And I think this is true in the 20s, but really true even just 25 years ago.

I think CEOs, people of means, were oftentimes living in the same neighborhoods with the people who worked on the factory floor of their companies.

And as a result, their kids went to the same schools.

And they went to the same temples and churches and ran into each other at the same restaurants and markets.

And I think that there's a cohesion there that's important for our culture.

And I think that increasingly that has come apart.

I'll give you actually a parallel that may seem not like a parallel, but to me is, which is we're all talking about right now the politicization potentially and independence of the Federal Reserve.

I actually remember as I was working on this book, looking at the diaries of a lot of the people who worked on the Federal Reserve on the board, and it was still such a new institution born in 1913.

that they were concerned about the political implications of either raising or lowering interest rates at any given moment.

They actually cared about the politics.

Now, it wasn't that Hoover was telling them exactly what to do, but they were so scared, not that they were just going to get hauled up in front of Congress for making the wrong choice, but that the entire thing, which people still called back then the experiment experiment,

at that point, that Congress could effectively disband this very idea.

And so I raise that only because it's clear to me that actually the independence of the Fed matters.

In fact, one of the reasons I think that they didn't act more forcefully in 1929 and in 1930 and after that was in part because there was their own concern about the politics, putting aside whether the White House was telling them one thing to do or the other.