Free Republic

Can Trump finally bring the gravy train to a screeching halt? During the Biden years, as inflation soared, Jerome Powell somehow said that inflation was transitory: Powell flirts again with a dangerous way to describe inflation: ‘Transitory’A fraught word resurfaced in the Federal Reserve’s lexicon again this week: ‘transitory.’ Yet somehow, he never blamed Biden’s energy policies (hundreds of billions in subsidies), open borders (hundreds of billions for various programs for illegals), or bureaucratic regulations, which all directly contributed to massive amounts spending, which in turn, created inflation when the Fed created the dollars needed for the bill. One of...

The video is a reaction/commentary piece analyzing a recent CNBC interview clip featuring Joe Kernen interviewing Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA). Key points covered: Warren criticizes Donald Trump for allegedly trying to exert political control over the Federal Reserve (e.g., threatening to fire Chair Jerome Powell and demanding influence over interest rates). She argues the Fed must remain independent and base decisions purely on economic data like inflation and unemployment, rather than political pressure, to avoid short-term boosts that harm long-term stability. The CNBC host (Kernen) and the video's narrator push back, accusing Warren of hypocrisy. They point out that during...

Tensions between a president and a Federal Reserve chairman are nothing new. Up until now, they may have reached a peak when Lyndon Johnson shoved William McChesney Martin at the LBJ ranch. Martin gave in a while later, another step into the inflationary quagmire from which the U.S. emerged only after Paul Volcker reasserted the Fed’s independence. However bad that Texas moment, it falls far short of the Department of Justice’s serving the Federal Reserve with grand jury subpoenas on Friday. They relate to testimony given to the Senate Banking Committee concerning an over-budget renovation project and come with the...

Federal prosecutors have opened a criminal investigation of Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, The New York Times reported on Sunday evening, citing officials briefed on the matter. The probe is eyeing “the central bank’s renovation of its Washington headquarters and whether Mr. Powell lied to Congress about the scope of the project,” the Times reported, citing those officials. The investigation is being overseen by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, according to the newspaper. That office is led by U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, a former New York state prosecutor and Fox News host, who was appointed to...

In the annals of political lawfare there’s dumb, and then there’s the criminal subpoena federal prosecutors delivered Friday to Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell. President Trump would do himself and the country a big favor by firing those responsible for this fiasco. The subpoena relates to testimony Mr. Powell gave to Congress in June concerning renovations to the Fed’s office buildings in Washington, D.C. Those renovations raised a brief ruckus over the summer after Administration officials such as Russ Vought of the Office of Management and Budget accused the Fed of running over budget on a needlessly grandiose project. Fair...

President Donald Trump early in his second term renamed the Department of Defense the Department of War. This was the original name given to our federal military in 1789 and it had been in effect until it was eliminated by legislation in 1947 and actively became the Department of Defense in 1949. In William Shakespeare’s great play Romeo and Juliet, Juliet utters the immortal line, “What’s in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” This name change by Trump is not to change the department’s smell, but to signify a change in tone, focus, and...

The Federal Reserve on Wednesday announced its third interest rate cut of the year as policymakers moved forward with the cut to support the labor market despite elevated inflation. Fed policymakers voted to lower the benchmark federal funds rate by 25 basis points to a new range of 3.5% to 3.75%. The move follows rate cuts of that size in September and October, which were the first of the year. Policymakers have been tracking economic data showing a slowdown in the labor market in recent months as companies adjust to shifts in trade and immigration policy. Meanwhile, inflation has trended...

Summary Fed's Kugler exited central bank amid trading rules violations New disclosures detail trading that broke Fed rules Kugler faces Fed Inspector General Inquiry NEW YORK, Nov 15 (Reuters) - Former Federal Reserve Governor Adriana Kugler, who abruptly resigned this summer, had multiple financial transactions in violation of the central bank's ethics rules, government filings showed on Saturday, with the matter referred to the Fed’s in-house watchdog for investigation. Kugler in late July had sought a waiver to deal with investing rules transgressions by her spouse - including trades in individual stocks and other transactions around Fed policy meetings -...

AI is Not Ready for Prime Time: The Infrastructure and Human Reality GapArtificial Intelligence has captured the imagination of investors, companies, and the public alike, promising unprecedented efficiency, automation, and insight. Headlines trumpet AI’s transformative power, but a closer examination reveals a significant gap between hype and operational reality.1. The AI Bubble: Investment vs. ValueAI has attracted billions of dollars in investment, reminiscent of the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s. Startups and established companies alike promote “AI-first” futures, claiming humans will be replaced, efficiency will soar, and profits will skyrocket. In practice, however:Most AI applications are effective only in...

Every living former chair of the Federal Reserve, as well as a slew of ex-Treasury secretaries and former White House economic advisors, urged the Supreme Court not to allow President Donald Trump to fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook as her lawsuit challenging her removal is pending. Signers included ex-Fed chairs Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, Janet Yellen; ex-Treasury secretaries Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, Hank Paulson, Jack Lew, and Timothy Geithner; and ex-CEA chairs Glenn Hubbard, Greg Mankiw, Christina Romer, Cecilia Rouse, Jared Bernstein, and Jason Furman.

President Donald Trump has asked the Supreme Court to allow him to fire Federal Reserve board member Lisa Cook, setting up a test of the president’s ability to take control of the powerful interest-rate setting body. The Justice Department on Thursday asked the high court to reverse the decisions of two lower courts that allowed Cook to remain in her position while the broader legal fight is underway. Their decisions enabled Cook to participate in a meeting this week that resulted in a quarter-point reduction in the interest rate. Trump’s incursion on the Federal Reserve is the culmination of his...

The chart below shows gold holdings (in yellow) and US Treasuries holdings as a percentage of foreign reserves. Gold is now a larger holding than US Treasuries for the first time in 30 years. We might be witnessing one of the most significant global rebalancing we’ve experienced in recent history, in my view. Where’s the World’s Gold Really Sitting? This chart shows the official gold reserves by country and the numbers are surprising. US has 8,133 tonnes—by far the leader. Then comes Germany (3,350 tonnes), Italy (2,452 tonnes), France (2,437 tonnes), Russia (2,330 tonnes), China (2,299 tonnes) and Switzerland (1,040...

Perhaps the only thing that might stop the Federal Reserve from cutting interest rates in a few weeks would be a surprisingly strong U.S. jobs report. Just don’t count on it. Hiring has slowed sharply since the spring after the Trump administration launched the biggest trade wars in decades. Even with those trade disputes dying down, businesses have been slow to add new employees. The U.S. economy added an average of only 35,000 new jobs from May through July, marking the smallest three-month increase since the pandemic in 2020. Wall Street isn’t expecting a big uptick in August, either. A...

They politicized the central bank under Obama and Biden, including by appointing Lisa Cook.It’s hard not to gag over the dirges in the press for the Federal Reserve’s “independence.” Or the encomiums to Gov. Lisa Cook, the Biden appointee President Trump fired last week, who has become a martyr for a cause Democrats didn’t much care about when they were in charge of Washington. “How the Future of the Fed Came to Rest on Lisa Cook” was a front-page New York Times headline on Saturday. Please. Democrats during the Obama and Biden presidencies tried to co-opt the central bank to...

President Donald Trump is attempting to fire Lisa Cook, one of the board members of the Federal Reserve. Mainstream commentators have described this as an unprecedented attack on the Fed's autonomy—no president has ever dismissed a member of the board, which is supposed to operate independent of political pressure—while conservatives say the allegations against Cook make her a special case. (Many libertarians, on the other hand, care less about tinkering with the Fed's composition and instead want to abolish it outright.) The Trump administration has accused Cook of committing mortgage fraud; William Pulte, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency,...

Good thing Jackie Alemany, co-host of MSNBC's The Weekend, wasn't being dramatic on Sunday. Otherwise, she might have said something like "The continued existence of all life on earth hangs in the balance!" Instead, the utterly undramatic Alemany merely said that if Federal Reserve Board Governor Lisa Cook was fired, "The stability of the global economy hangs in the balance." Alemany warned that global markets could enter a "red zone" if Cook's tenure went kaput.Get the rest of the story and view the video here.

A key leader in the world economy is warning that undue interference in the Federal Reserve’s operations by President Donald Trump could pose a serious economic risk to the U.S. and the rest of the world. European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde said in an interview with Radio Classique on Monday that efforts to remove Fed Chair Jerome Powell or Fed Governor Lisa Cook would “represent a very serious danger for the U.S. economy and the world economy.” “If U.S. monetary policy were no longer independent and instead dependent on the dictates of this or that person, then I believe...

Lisa Cook is, or was, a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve. President Trump wrote Cook a letter, firing her for cause, i.e., mortgage fraud. He announced the firing on Truth Social:Rather than going quietly, Cook responded by suing Trump and others, alleging that grounds for her firing do not exist and asking for declaratory and injunctive relief to that effect. It alleges that Trump’s grounds for firing Cook are pretextual, and the firing is an attack on the Fed’s vaunted independence. The Cook cases raises several issues. The Federal Reserve Act says that the president...

US Homeland Security News @defense_civil25 🚨Alert: President Trump orders US Marshals to remove Defiant Fed Governor Lisa Cook after she refuses to step down!

It’s time to call a spade a spadeThe notion that the Fed is some kind of sterling institution needs to be put to bed. This is particularly true of the Powell Fed which has experienced multiple scandals involving criminal activity. The fact that no one went to jail because “laws are for little people” doesn’t absolve the Fed.Let’s wind back the clocks.During the pandemic, when millions of people were losing their jobs, despairing of their futures, and terrified of dying, senior Fed officials were making MILLIONS of dollars trading on insider information based on Fed policy decisions.Specifically, three Fed Presidents,...