Meet Your New Fed Chair: Donald Trump

Yet Reagan didn’t blame the Fed. At a press conference he said the cause was a too-high budget deficit. The real reason turned out to be neither interest rates nor the budget deficit so much as automated trading, but set that aside. Reagan didn’t point fingers at the Fed, which would have been an entirely plausible target. He instead blamed himself and Congress for not lowering a deficit that was about 3 percent of the GDP, or about half what it is today. He even signaled that he might be open to a tax increase, though that didn’t happen until his successor, President George H.W. Bush, took office.

My point is not to play Reagan nostalgist, but rather to demonstrate that even Reagan, who set this country on the reactionary course of which the nihilistic end point is now in sight, respected norms for which Trump has no regard. The most important of these is that the Fed operates independently of the president and Congress.

The courts will consider whether Trump’s “for cause” firing of Cook is legitimate, and Cook may win at the district and appellate level. But she’ll probably lose at the Supreme Court, even though the high court tried to warn Trump off trying to seize control of the Fed. This is all the dress rehearsal for Trump firing Jerome Powell, and I think the Supreme Court will let him do that, too. Even before that happens, Cook’s firing is, as the University of Pennsylvania’s Peter Conti-Brown told The New York Times, “the end of central bank independence as we know it.”