Why Fed Independence Is Hanging by a Thread | Odd Lots

Last August, President Trump made the unprecedented choice of moving to fire Fed governor Lisa Cook. The administration claimed she was being terminated with cause, citing an ongoing investigation in alleged mortgage fraud committed by Cook. The legal battle between Cook and the administration has been tangled in the courts for the last year, eventually reaching the Supreme Court. This June, in a 5-4 decision, the court ruled in favor of Cook. However at the same time, in a different case, the court allowed the President to fire individual members of the FTC, undermining its role as quasi-independent body not beholden to the executive branch. On this episode we speak with Columbia Law School's Lev Menand and Nathan Tankus, president of Notes on the Crises. The two of them lay out the consequences of these two decisions and they dig into the generations-long legal history, starting with Alexander Hamilton, that explains how we got here.

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