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Ben Bernanke: It used to be that the mystique of central banking was all about not letting anybody know what you were doing. As recently as 1994, the Federal Reserve didn't even tell the public when it changed the target for the federal funds rate.
Kyle Campbell: That's the voice of former Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke speaking at the first-ever Federal Open Market Committee press conference on April 27th, 2011. It was as CBS's Anthony Mason put it at the time:
Anthony Mason: This is that rare news conference that actually makes news before it happens.
Campbell: It was a watershed moment as the historically secretive central bank described both its monetary policy and the thinking behind it in something approaching plain English. The Fed had been inching out of the shadows for years through written policy statements and quarterly projections by that point, but the press conference opened the institution to the general population in a way it had never done before.
Bernanke: We thought it was a natural next step. I personally have always been a big believer in providing as much information as you can to help the public understand what you're doing to help the markets understand what you're doing and to be accountable to the public for what you're doing.
Campbell: Janet Yellen, a chief architect of the Fed's transparency push during her tenure as Vice chair of the Fed, kept that spirit alive when she took the reins of the board in 2014. This is her in 2013.
Janet Yellen: In the past two decades — and especially under Chairman Bernanke — the Federal Reserve has provided more and clearer information about its goals. Like the chairman, I strongly believe that monetary policy is most effective when the public understands what the Fed is trying to do and how it plans to do it.
Campbell: And Jerome Powell, who succeeded Yellen as chair in 2018, has held press conferences after every FOMC meeting instead of just quarterly. He also invited the public to weigh in on monetary policy through the Fed Listens outreach program in 2019 and 2020.
Jerome Powell: Congress has granted the Federal Reserve significant protections from short-term political pressures. We have an obligation to clearly explain what we are doing and why, and we have an obligation to actively engage the people we serve so that they and their elected representatives can hold us accountable.
Campbell: Yet despite this incremental expansion of the Fed's media availability and expressed desire to reach ordinary people, the deep skepticism that Americans have long held toward their central bank is stubbornly hard to dislodge. The Fed has been the subject of populist angst since it was created in 1913, and over the past century, politicians of all stripes have blamed it for many things, from bailing out large banks to holding back labor markets and mismanaging inflation. Heading into this year's elections, the Fed, at least as of now, appears to be on the right side of those issues. It stopped a banking crisis last year from spreading beyond a handful of banks, and it seems to have navigated the economy toward the elusive soft landing, stabilizing prices without triggering a recession. But there's no guarantee it stays above the political fray as the presidential election heats up, because for all its efforts, the Fed is one part of the government that people love to hate. So why is an institution that is trying so hard to position itself as a populist champion always the target of populist anger?
From American Banker, I'm Kyle Campbell and this is Bank Shot, a podcast about banks, finance and the world we live in.
Don Kohn: If I think about even as far back as the 1830s when Andrew Jackson vetoed the renewal of the Second Bank of the United States because he felt that it was doing the bidding of Nicholas Biddle who was a wealthy Philadelphian, I guess, around the bank and his buddies. So I think there's been suspicion of banks, bankers and of central banks for a long time in American history, so it's not surprising that it continues to exist.
Campbell: This is Don Kohn.
Kohn: So I'm Don Kohn. I'm a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
Campbell: Kohn was a longtime Fed staffer and official and served as secretary of the Open Market Committee for 15 years before being named to the Fed Board of Governors by President George W. Bush in 2002. He served on the board for eight years, including four as vice president.
Kohn: Earlier in my career, and I was at the Federal Reserve for 40 years, starting in 1970, Wright Patman, a Democrat from Texas, usually embodied a populist idea that the Fed was working for the big banks and not for the small guy. The Federal Reserve itself, when it was founded in 1913, tried to balance all that by having a central authority — the Board of Governors — and then the 12 reserve banks. Now, the reserve banks had ties to the local banking community. Those were the boards of directors, but the central authority was appointed by the president, Wilson, at the time. So the Fed has always tried to balance the regional versus the central, the bankers versus public policy.
Campbell: The result of this balancing act was a hybrid system with both public and private components. The Board of Governors wield the power of the federal government to set policies and the reserve banks, under the direction of their regional bank members, implement those policies. The banks also gathered information about conditions in their district and transmitted findings to the board to inform its policies.
Jeffrey Lacker: The Fed has deep roots in populism.
Campbell: This is Jeffrey Lacker.
Lacker: So my name is Jeffrey Lacker. I was president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond from 2004 through 2017. Right now, I am a senior affiliated scholar at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.
Campbell: The Fed's founding populism was not one that explicitly prioritized the interests of individuals over institutions, Lacker says, but rather one that leveled the playing field between smaller banks and their larger rivals.
Lacker: Because of the funky way the monetary system was regulated, in crises, there was a scramble for currency and coin. And all the cities had clearinghouses, but those clearinghouses kind of banded together and protected all their members and the members tended to cut off country banks. The New York clearinghouse banks would not send currency to country banks that were experiencing runs. So in some sense it was, you had a pile of currency in a crisis, who was going to get it? And it was kind of scarce. And the Clearinghouse banks, like in New York and Chicago, were the ones deciding that the country banks wouldn't get it. So in some sense, the Fed was founded to give country banks, rural agrarian interest, a greater voice in the way crises were handled.
Alan Blinder: I wouldn't call the founding of the Fed populist. I mean, in fact, the founders of the Fed were trying to escape in a variety of ways, the view that they were just captives of the bankers and this whole thing was a cabal in favor of the bankers.
Campbell: This is Alan Blinder.
Blinder: Alan Blinder. I'm a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University. Currently, on leave at the Peterson Institute in Washington, and what is, by now, a long time ago, I was vice chairman of the Fed from '94-'96, and prior to that I was on president Clinton's Council of Economic Advisors.
Campbell: Blinder says populist politics have long favored expansionary monetary policies, ones that facilitate the growth of the money supply with the aim of generating more economic activity.
Blinder: Populism has always stood, when it has anything to do with monetary policy, for easy money, and therefore, without realizing it, higher inflation.
Campbell: Because of this, some early 20th century policymakers argued that the government should have no hand in shaping monetary policy.
Blinder: One of the rationales for that view was if you left this to the popular whim, you would get generically easy money and inflation. And one of the things the central bank is supposed to do is stand against those kinds of inflationary forces.
Campbell: There are many real-world examples of this phenomenon from all over the world. One recent example is the case of Argentina, where central bank policies have for years sought to accommodate political priorities. Inflation in the South American country recently hit a staggering rate of 161%, creating an outlook so bleak that recently elected President Javier Milei campaigned last year on adopting the U.S. dollar as the nation's currency, a move that would've effectively outsourced monetary policy to the Federal Reserve.
Blinder: Political change in Argentina has generally brought with it a change in the central bank. That's not true in America.
Campbell: Still, over time the Fed's blending of public and private authorities has given way to a more government-based approach.
Lacker: In the 1930s, with the Banking Act of 1935, power was centralized in the Board of Governors, largely just out of the interests of Mariner Eccles and the Roosevelt administration who wanted to centralize power at the federal government level. So that has been a countervailing force, centralizing power.
Campbell: Even so a stronger board of governors did not mean a more populist central bank. The Fed's primary concern at the time was keeping inflation low at all costs. This is a pursuit traditionally favored by business interests and conservatives. The Employment Act of 1946 directed the Fed to promote full employment, but this obligation was scarcely acknowledged and not viewed as binding. It wasn't until the 1970s that the broader public began to think of inflation and employment as being related.
Lacker: In the '74-'75 recession cycle, the Fed was seeing this surge in inflation across '73 and into '74, was raising interest rates, was kind of hesitating about how far to push that. Then unemployment started rising and they pivoted to fighting unemployment and I think that in the popular media coverage of that, I think, conveyed a sense in which there were some tradeoffs in which conveyed a sense that, yeah, the Fed can choose to fight inflation or to combat high unemployment and it can't do both at the same time. What was lost on them was the lesson of Volker, which is that in the long run it's better for employment to get inflation down, but before that lesson was really learned and absorbed, you had the 1977 Humphrey Hawkins Act that enshrines this dual mandate and that was very much a populist response to the conduct of monetary policy in the 1970s and the perception that fighting inflation required large sacrifices in terms of labor market outcomes.
Campbell: Humphrey-Hawkins — known officially as the full Employment and Balanced Growth Act — was a sweeping reform package that grew out of the Civil Rights Movement. Its biggest aim was to create a federal jobs guarantee, which never came to fruition. Still, it impacted the Fed in several ways. It put forth the idea of a maximum employment mandate, a concept that was codified by the Federal Reserve Reform Act of 1977. Humphrey Hawkins also set the Fed on its current course of transparency by requiring it to issue reports to Congress on monetary policy twice a year. Those reports are now typically accompanied by congressional testimony from the chair.
Powell: We at the Fed remain squarely focused on our dual mandate to promote maximum employment and stable prices for the American people.
Campbell: This is Powell presenting the Fed's monetary policy report to the Senate Banking Committee last June.
Powell: We understand that our actions affect communities, families and businesses across the country. Everything we do is in service to our public mission. We at the Fed will do everything we can to achieve our maximum employment and price stability goals.
Campbell: But some say the mandate is misunderstood or even misguided. We'll hear more about that after a quick break.
Welcome back to Bank Shot. The Fed has invoked the dual mandate often during the past two years as it has sought to combat rampant inflation through tighter monetary policy. It has become a regular part of Powell's speeches, testimonies and press conferences, but some say the mandate is misunderstood or even misguided.
Norbert Michel: It was a mistake to have to change it over to that dual mandate in the '70s, late '70s that was based, at the time even, on some macro ideas that at least in some quarters were going out of it. And I do think that that was a mistake. I don't think that belongs in the mandate.
Campbell: This is Norbert Michel, director of the Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank
Michel: Throughout the history of what the Fed's even said, the Board of Governors has said, and most of the people running the different branches, typically they would all admit, and they have in writing, that monetary policy does not have a long-term effect on employment, that structural unemployment is beyond the view of monetary policy. Other real factors that are in the economy that are structural that are either there or not there, but they have nothing to do with monetary policy. The Fed trying to foster easier credit conditions in the economy. That's pretty much all we can do. And if there are all these other problems in the market, in the economy that lead to unemployment, us letting somebody have a loan or us helping other banks make other loans isn't really going to solve that problem and isn't really going to change that structural inefficiency or structural weakness. So given that, which I take as sort of a noncontroversial proposition, then the question, of course, is why are we conducting monetary policy as if we can do that when everybody admits that we can't do that? So that's a problem and I've always said that that's a problem.
Campbell: In other words, the effect of interest rates on employment is at best indirect. Easier credit conditions tend to result in more lending and might encourage a firm to expand its operations and, by extension, expand its payroll. But there are other ways to view the Fed's mission that take into account the full breadth of its powers.
Karen Petrou: It doesn't have a dual mandate. The law has a triple mandate and I just think it's important to remember the law expressly says the Fed's mandate is maximum employment, price stability and, here I quote, moderate long-term interest rates. The Fed historically ignored the latter on grounds that price stability and maximum employment can only proceed with moderate long-term interest rates. But of course, we haven't had moderate long-term interest rates for years.
Campbell: This is Karen Petrou.
Petrou: I'm Karen Petrou, managing partner of Federal Financial Analytics.
Campbell: Petrou's firm serves as a consultant to commercial banks and their service providers as well as central banks and other financial regulators. She's also the author of a book about the impacts of the Fed's monetary policy and a widely respected expert on the subject. In her estimation, the Fed has played fast and loose with its statutory obligations in a way that has hurt the average American, notwithstanding the Fed's insistence to the contrary.
Petrou: The Fed from 2013, when it by its own admission realized the economy had stabilized after the great financial crisis, nonetheless violated its mandate by keeping interest rates at or below zero after taking inflation into account. You will recall interest rates were pretty much zero and even though inflation was 1% or 2% throughout most of that decade, that meant interest rates were negative, which meant that people couldn't save for the future. It was much more profitable to borrow than to save. And we saw a lot of economic distortion, huge amounts of yield chasing that led to the kinds of behavior that precipitated the 2020 crashes. The pandemic helped, of course, but the market was extremely fragile because there had been so much speculation. It's a terrible policy.
Campbell: But the translation of the Fed's monetary policy decisions into real-world impacts is also indirect. Interest rates affect lending but also move markets, both of which can make a big difference for ordinary people and their financial choices. And the Fed itself is grappling with how to explain how its actions affect ordinary people to ordinary people and also to itself.
Claudia Sahm: They spend and have always spent a lot of time trying to communicate with financial markets, looking at what interest rates do, what other financial conditions do and that is important. That is the Fed does its work through financial markets and yet a real awareness of what does that mean in the real economy, what does that look like? What are the trade-offs to get you that dual mandate of stable prices versus maximum employment over time. The Fed has, especially since Janet Yellen was chair, spent more and more time trying to not just communicate that connection but really understand it.
Campbell: This is ...
Sahm: Claudia Sahm. I am the founder of Sahm Consulting and a former Federal Reserve and White House economist.
Campbell: Sahm, who left the Fed in 2019, says recent years have seen the Fed acknowledge that while its policies hit financial markets first, their impact is greatest on the most vulnerable households and businesses.
Sahm: The stakes are highest for the Fed's decisions for workers, families, businesses that are on the margins. A great recovery is going to pull in those who are normally left behind. The Fed has to balance out how hard do we push to get inflation down versus how much do we let this run in the labor market. And frankly, that was not a conversation that the Fed had had frankly since the beginning of the dual mandate. Economists redefined their dual mandate maximum employment was the best we could do with stable prices with low inflation. So then you really don't have an employment mandate, we got to get inflation down. I think that's changed a lot. What the mortgage rate is, what the small business loan rate is, credit card that affects decisions people make that affects opportunities to go to college, buy the house. It's like real-world stakes and it's important that the Fed connects the faces, the people who're being affected and I think they've had that conversation more and more, but it's hard to have both conversations. Markets are not thinking about the dual mandate, that's not their responsibility to investors.
Campbell: There's no coincidence that the Fed's conversations have changed since the collapse of the housing bubble. In 2008, the Fed's response to the ensuing financial crisis included lending to large financial institutions in an asset buying campaign known as quantitative easing moves that stoked some of the strongest fears about the institution.
Blinder: What did they see? They saw the Fed doing, all kinds of things, including things they'd never imagined the Fed could do and we had a deep slump. Now professors of economics like me could say, 'Yeah, we had a deep slump, but it would've been worse without those actions.' But in the broad public that's not into economic modeling and things like that, which is almost everybody, those kinds of arguments don't carry much weight. So to me it's a tremendous irony that I wrote about in a book I wrote about the crisis, "After the Music Stopped," that the Fed was in fact very success after Lehman, but there was a tremendous backlash against the Fed and also in Congress. I think what got a lot of people in Congress upset was to learn for the first time, they should have known this before, but they didn't, what enormous powers the Fed had in an emergency. The Fed started lending, you know, to AIG — an insurance company — and quite a few others. Many members of Congress were unhappy about that. 'God is this central bank really that powerful? They don't need us to — Congress to act to approve something like that?' So they were unpopular with the public for the reasons I said, they were unpopular with a lot of the Congress for the reasons that I just said, even though post-Lehman they pursued very successful monetary and financial policy,
Kohn: The response in 2008, I think, was widely misunderstood. So it looked like the Federal Reserve was saving Wall Street and allowing Main Street to go under, to be hurt, and that wasn't of course our intent at all. The reason that we, and I was part of that at the time, were trying to stabilize Wall Street and stabilize the financial system was so that the financial system would meet the needs of ordinary people and businesses and keep the economy going. But I do think there was a lot of misunderstanding of what we were doing. A lot of sense that not only the Fed, but the government more generally didn't really punish the people who caused the problem. I don't think we had the capacity to do that or the authority to do that, but that was a perception and if anything, the Fed came out of that 2008 rescue as being seen as more siding with the elites and less with the ordinary people. So I think the effort that Jay Powell has led to explain more of what the Fed's doing to ordinary people and to listen, remember that thing was called Fed Listens
Campbell: To that end, the Fed in 2019 launched a public listening tour called Fed Listens part of a multiyear review of its monetary policy. The events were aimed at hearing from nontraditional stakeholders in monetary policy — unions, employee groups, retirees, low and moderate income communities, small-business owners and others — to hear the public's thoughts and concerns firsthand.
Kohn: My understanding, I wasn't in the Fed at the time, was that those sessions were influential. I mean the Fed was listening to what the concerns of people were and trying to figure out how it could shape its policy and pursuit of the goals that Congress gave it to benefit as many people as possible. So it wasn't just us explaining to them, it was us listening to them and having them help us shape our policy to their advantage. So I do think coming out of the 2008, the Jay Powell effort to explain better to Congress and to the American public and to listen on the other side has been an important mitigant to help reverse some of the damage that the perception of what we did in 2008 was aimed at just helping Wall Street.
Campbell: Whether the Fed Listens events have boosted public affection for the Fed is unclear, but it has influenced monetary policy. One of the outcomes of this process was a new framework that would allow inflation to run slightly above the Fed's 2% target at times so long as it averaged 2% over the long
Petrou: The idea was you would let inflation go above 2% and just basically hot wire the economy. This was a big Yellen idea so that you could really pedal some gas into the engine and this is one of the reasons why, in 2021 when inflation started to take off, it wasn't just the team transitory, it was also because the monetary policy framework at that time said, let inflation go above 2% and we'll know when it's too much when we see it. Well the Fed, of course, didn't know when it was too much, again because of the team transitory confusions combined with the fact that the policy framework they had could only control it with rapid, rapid interest rate increases, which had raised the significant risk of significant financial crises. But for the fact that the Fed is also hugely in the market, thanks to its still enormous portfolio and all its various backstops. The Fed, by its own acknowledgement, knows that it doesn't know what it's doing.
Campbell: Kohn said the policy shift was largely a response to the post-financial crisis recovery, which saw years of modest job growth and at times an inflation rate well below the Fed's target. But he added the listening sessions seemed to have played a role too.
Kohn: I've been told by people who were inside the Federal Reserve at the time, as I was not, that those sessions did have an effect on how policy was framed. So I do think that listening to people and how important a strong economy and strong job market was helped to perhaps delay the Fed's response to inflation. Now once they figured out they were behind the curve, they caught up very, very quickly and inflation's come down very fast. So overall, I think they've certainly been successful over the last year or two after letting things get out of control earlier. So yeah, I do think it's influenced their policy to some extent.
Campbell: That brings us to today's environment. After raising interest rates sharply in 2022 and keeping them high last year, the Fed has signaled cuts might be appropriate at some point this year. Should that come to pass, it would add an additional wrinkle to an already messy economic picture in which individual outlooks are broadly negative. Despite rosy statistics,
Blinder: One of the poorly explained paradoxes of the current political situation is that experts, and I don't want to limit that to economists, most of the readers of your publication will be experts by this definition. See, the economy is in great shape. I mean really good shape. And the broad public doesn't. Now as things get better, as inflation comes down, as interest rates come down, making houses more affordable and auto loans more affordable and so on, I think that attitude starts migrating from very, very sour where it still is today, it shouldn't be, but it is, to more and more favorable, which does two things. It should reduce what a lot of people, including myself, have been calling the general grumpiness. People are just grumpy. I think that should help.
Campbell: But some see the current negative outlook among the general population as something deeper and more tangible than mere grumpiness.
Petrou: The main reason economic populism on the left and the right is so virulent is because of the last 15 years of financial policy have pushed them farther and farther behind. It is harder and harder for all but the top 10, if you want to be generous, 20% of American households to make it through the week. Sixty-four percent of American households live paycheck to paycheck. It's harder for them, for many to afford a home. It is impossible for most of them to save for retirement and the majority of even upper middle class households are skipping medical payments. They can't afford them based on all of what I just said. And wouldn't you be angry? You're working hard. You can't have what you grew up expecting, a house with one or two more or less, okay, cars, a two week vacation someplace, and some economic security that you can put aside so your kids do even better. That's out of reach. That fundamental "American Dream" is out of reach for most Americans. And many are really angry. This is why Donald Trump did so well in 2016, and … came close in 2020 and is doing fine right now, because he channels that anger.
Donald Trump: And we have a Fed that's doing political things. This Janet Yellen of the Fed. The Fed is doing political by keeping the interest rates at this level. And believe me, the day Obama goes off and he leaves and he goes out to the golf course for the rest of his life to play golf. When they raise interest rates, you're going to see some very bad things happen.
Campbell: That was Trump during his first presidential debate in 2016. His stance toward the Fed did not soften once he was in the Oval Office.
Trump: I think the Fed is out of control. I think what they're doing is wrong. Under the Obama administration, you had a lot of help because they had very little interest. When you talk about economies, our economy is far better than that, but we have actually, we're paying interest and they weren't. They were using footing money, but I think the Fed is far too stringent and they're making a mistake and it's not right.
Campbell: That was in 2018, in response to the Fed's gradual raising of interest rates off their lower bound and the relationship would grow more tense during the COVID-19 pandemic when Trump grew frustrated with the Fed's decision not to cut interest rates as much as its central bank counterparts did in Europe.
Trump: We have some tremendous opportunities right now, but Jerome Powell is not making it easy. No, I have the right to remove. I'm not doing that. No, I'm not doing that. I have the right, right to also take him and put him in a regular position and put somebody else in charge and I haven't made any decisions on that.
Campbell: It's hard to know ahead of time how much of Trump's bluster will translate into action. But his disdain for entrenched bureaucracies and his insistence that all oars of government row in one direction could challenge the Fed's longstanding independence. Independence that it has to say, incorporate informal conversations with ordinary people into its monetary policy decisions or ignore politicians' preferences entirely.
Blinder: We have a threat that Donald Trump becomes president of the United States. That's a fact. You don't have to call it a threat. Some people think it's a wonderful possibility. It certainly could happen. And the reason I'm bringing it up now is that it could be a threat to the independence of the Federal Reserve. And I think this country, like many others, should cherish the independence of its central bank, which among other things, enables the central bank. They're not always 100% right, but it enables the central bank to do what it thinks is best for the nation, regardless of politics. We don't want to lose that. The independence of the Fed is not really in the Constitution or anything special. It's tacit, really, mostly in the Federal Reserve Act. A compliant Congress with a president that would sign the legislation can destroy the independence of the Fed tomorrow. That won't happen now, Joe Biden would never sign such a bill. Donald Trump gets elected, that, among many things, becomes a real danger.
Campbell: It's worth noting that it would be a tall task to get Congress to participate in wholesale changes to the Fed, be it legislation amending its independence or pointing governors with fringe beliefs. While both parties have gripes with the Fed, at times safeguarding it, sanctity tends to be a bipartisan issue. But if Trump has proven anything, it is that he's unafraid to speak his mind when he feels he has been wronged and for the Fed, any move to lower rates runs the risk of being flagged by the presumptive Republican nominee as an attempt to sway things in Biden's favor even if current and former Fed officials insist that is not how things work.
Kohn: When I was on the open market committee and I attended meetings from about 1980-81 through 2012, so I attended about 30 years' worth of meetings. I never heard politics being discussed. I mean, you have to take account of whatever the policies are that the Congress and the president are enacting because they affect the economy and you need to take account of that in order to adjust monetary policy to meet your dual mandate. But the political side, Democrats, Republicans, populists, elitist, whatever, that never gets discussed in open market committee. So the Fed is definitely not a partisan institution, really hasn't been. There are accusations that Arthur Buns in the 1970s trying to help Richard Nixon get reelected, but I would say since 1979 when Paul Volker took over, I have never sensed the Fed leaning towards one party or another. It's trying to do the job the Congress gave it to do.
Campbell: Having sort of been in the room when these decisions are made, do you sort of think about how decisions are going to be interpreted, whether they're going to be used by one side to argue a certain point or another in the political space, or are you able to sort of block out that noise entirely?
Lacker: I think Fed decision makers generally block that out pretty well. There's times at which I, they're sensitive to the political environment, but as a general matter, I think the Fed tries to avoid large economic disruptions, and sharply rising unemployment is like the number one economic disruption they like to avoid. Top of the list. Large declines in equity values would be second on the list, and then third would be large financial institution, the stress. So they're always conscious of that, but that's sort of bread and butter, monetary policymaking in a sense.
Campbell: Even if politics do not make their way into the decisions the Fed makes, it still has to contend with its own credibility in the eyes of Congress and the broader public, a consideration that could shape policy in, again, indirect ways.
Sahm: They're not going to try and put a thumb on the scale either way. They're going to focus on their job and do it the best they can, and they're used to getting blamed for it. Nothing in D.C. is outside of the political crossfire. They know that this is not their first rodeo at the Fed, so it'll be OK. It's just going to be messy. My base case is that all this politics does not interfere with the Fed's decision making and yet knowing the dynamics and some of the Fed's home standing fears about its credibility, that there's a risk that it does slow things down and it's workers, it's small businesses, it's communities that would pay for that. And that's not fair.