It Could Happen Here - Why the Federal Reserve Crisis Matters

Episode Date: January 22, 2026

In her most foolish act yet, Mia attempts to explain what the Federal Reserve is, why it matters, and how Trump seizing control of it could crash the world economy. Sources: https://fortune.com/2025/08/09/trump-fed-pick-stephen-miran-existential-threat-central-bank-independence/https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/supreme-court-weighs-trumps-firing-feds-lisa-cook-by-social-media-2026-01-20/https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FEDFUNDShttps://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/20/powell-could-stay-at-fed-even-after-being-removed-as-chair.htmlhttps://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RPONTSYD#https://apnews.com/article/jerome-powell-federal-reserve-trump-af06d80b28be9c8a5de9c3b2fe33fa3dhttps://www.federalreserve.gov/aboutthefed/the-fed-explained.htmhttps://www.cfr.org/articles/mar-lago-accord-not-recipe-successhttps://www.newyorkfed.org/research/staff_reports/sr1047.htmlhttps://fortune.com/2025/08/08/what-to-know-about-stephen-miran-the-tariff-proponent-trump-just-nominated-to-join-the-feds-board-of-governors/https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0sg0782hhttps://www.newyorkfed.org/aboutthefed/goldvault.htmlhttps://libcom.org/article/debt-first-5000-years-david-graeberhttps://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/greenspanput.asphttps://finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-fed-chair-search-becoming-163021470.htmlhttps://www.newyorkfed.org/aboutthefed/more-about-what-we-dohttps://www.stlouisfed.org/in-plain-english/who-owns-the-federal-reserve-bankshttps://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/about_14986.htmhttps://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/powell20260111a.htmhttps://www.cnn.com/2026/01/19/politics/supreme-court-shield-federal-reserve-from-donald-trumpSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. I didn't really have an interest of being on air. I kind of was up there to just try and infiltrate the building. From the underground clubs that shaped global music to the pastors and creatives who built the cultural empire. The Atlanta Ears podcast uncovers the stories behind one of the most influential cities in the world. The thing I love about Atlanta is that it's a city of hustlers, man. Each episode explores a different chapter of Atlanta's rise, featuring conversations with ludicrous.

Will Packer, Pastor Jamal Bryant, DJ Drama, and more. The full series is available to listen to now. Listen to Atlanta is on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Social media trend is slanding some Jen Z ears in jail. The progressive media darling whose public meltdown got her fired, and the massive TikTok boycott against Target that actually makes no sense. You won't hear about these online stories in the mainstream media, but you can keep up with them and all the other injuries.

entertaining and outrageous things happening online, in media, and in politics with the Bread versus Everyone podcast. Listen to the Brad versus Everyone podcast on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Also Media. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about which calamity this country and many others are going through this week. I am your host, Mia Wong.

And today, we're going to be. be talking about the Federal Reserve. Now, those of you who have listened to Executive Disorder are aware that a bit over a week ago, as this episode is being released, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome H. Powell released what, again, I can really only describe as someone escaping from a kidnapping and releasing a video about it,

in which he discussed a Justice Department grand jury subpoena and a threat to indict him over cost overruns on a new Federal Reserve building. Now, Jerome Powell has claimed that these charges are really about removing him and about eliminating the independence of the Federal Reserve. he also claims that he was directly threatened with these charges unless he was willing to adjust federal reserve policy to fall in line with the Trump administration. And this is an astonishing video for a number of reasons. One is that it's in a lot of ways one of the most direct points of defiance.

that a government official has taken directly to the president? It's also astonishing because it is actually technically the second time that Trump has tried to do something like this to a member of the Federal Reserve Board because as you're listening to this, the Supreme Court has been hearing arguments about Trump's attempt to fire one of the other members of the Federal Reserve. border woman named Lisa Cook. Now, obviously, I don't know yet what the outcome of that deliberation is going to be. It seems right now that the Supreme Court is un compelled with Trump's ability to fire

a Federal Reserve Board member over really, truly very trumped-up charges about mortgage fraud. I'm going to quote here from the Supreme Court in what has become a very important statement. Quote, the Federal Reserve is a uniquely structured quasi-private entity that follows in the distinct tradition of the first and second banks of the United States. The importance of this statement is that the Supreme Court has been willing to allow Trump to fire the heads of other, you know, what are supposed to be independent entities, right? or fire members of what are supposed to be independent federal agencies. He's been able to, just completely illegally, by the way,

but with the approval of the Supreme Court, been able to fire a lot of people who were appointed under the Biden administration to posts in independent regulatory agencies. However, so far, the Supreme Court has balked at doing this for the Federal Reserve. Now, why is that and why is this? entire thing so important. To understand that question and to understand why I've spent so much time talking about what in the grand scheme of things seems like a kind of minor, you know, just like another

example of Trump attempting to use the judiciary and investigations to go after as political enemies, we need to talk about what the Federal Reserve is and what it does. because this is arguably the central institution of global capitalism. And its importance in maintaining the global capitalist economy is, to a large extent, the reason why this is the point at which U.S. senators who are aligned with Trump on every other issue have actively taken a stand against this sort of prosecution of Jerome Powell. It's why the Supreme Court seems to not be interested in allowing Trump to wield the executive power. And this is because fucking with the Federal Reserve is fucking with the money. So what is the Federal Reserve?

The Federal Reserve, to put it mildly, is an extremely confusing entity. So if you remember back to a few minutes ago when I said that the Supreme Court said that the Federal Reserve is a uniquely structured quasi-private entity. We could ask the question, okay, so it's a quasi-private entity. Is it a public entity or is it a private entity? This is a relatively simple question. Here is the answer provided by the St. Louis Federal Reserve's website. Quote, the Federal Reserve banks are not a part of the federal government, but they exist because of an act of Congress. Their purpose is to serve the public. So is the Fed private or public? The answer is both. While the board of governors is an independent government agency, the Federal Reserve banks are set up like private corporations.

Member banks hold stock in the Federal Reserve and earn dividends. Holding the stock does not carry with it the control and financial interests given to holders of common stock and for-profit organizations, the stock may not be sold or pledged as collateral for loans. Okay, so here's the Federal Reserve's answer to is it a public or private entity is both. The Board of Governors is an independent agency. The Federal Reserve Bank is set up like private corporations, so it's sort of both. Okay, question settled. It's both.

We can move on. Wait, hold on. I am receiving word that the Federal Reserve has comments on this idea. Hold on, hold on, let me, let me turn to the Federal Reserve, the national Federal Reserve's website, which has a comment on the idea that the Federal Reserve banks are private entities. Okay, here we go, here we go, quoting them now. Some observers mistakenly consider the Federal Reserve to be a private entity

because the reserve banks are organized similar to private corporations. For instance, each of the 12 reserve banks operates within its own particular geographic area or district of the United States, and each is separately incorporated and has its own board of directors. Commercial banks that are members of the federal reserve system hold stock in their district's reserve bank. Now, okay, let's look at what we have here. These are two different websites run by two different parts of the Federal Reserve, one of which says that the Federal Reserve banks are not part of the federal government, but they exist because of an act of Congress. So is the Fed public or private? The answer is both. Because the Federal Reserve banks are set up

like private corporations, that's the St. Louis Federal Reserve. Now, the National Federal Reserve says, quote, so observers mistakenly consider the Federal Reserve to be. be a private entity because the reserve banks are organized similarly to private corporations. So you can see that we are dealing here with an absolute goddamn mess because if you read the two websites of different federal versions of the Federal Reserve, national and branches of the Federal Reserve, they say different things about what it is and they sound like they're arguing each other. Now, okay, I am doing this because it's funny. technically both of these agree with each other, but this is a shit show, because part of the purpose of the Federal Reserve is to be an entity that does research and distribute information to the public, and its websites can't agree on what it is.

Now, again, I'm being slightly pedantic here. Technically, both versions of this story do you say that this is both a public and a private entity, sort of? Now, again, and this is a basic question about the Federal Reserve. Is it a public or private entity? And they can't agree on it. And this is, to use a technical term, a fucking nightmare. Because again, the actual answer is that it is sort of both. The banks themselves are like technically private, but they're run by the board of governors,

which is technically a government agency, and they were established by the government. So attempting to sort out this colossal mess has, inside of academia, this has caused a change in the conception of what the state is because what is this crap. So, okay, let's actually run through the structure of the Federal Reserve. So importantly, the Federal Reserve is kind of three entities. In a way, you can think about this like the Holy Trinity. right, you have the 12 Federal Reserve banks, and those banks are collectively managed by what are called governors, who serve on what is called the Board of Governors, which is the second entity.

And then there's also the Federal Open Market Committee, which, for our purposes, we don't care about that much, but is composed of the seven members of the Board of Governors, and this is the Court of Fed itself, he's composed of the seven members of the Board of Governors, the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and four of the remaining 11 Reserve Bank presidents who serve one-year terms on a rotating basis. So, okay, we have three entities, right? We have the decentralized Federal Reserve Banks,

which there's 12 of them. They cover different geographic regions of the country. We have the Board of Governors, which oversees them, and the Board of Governors is the part that is technically a government agency, and these governors are importantly for our purposes nominated by the president and confirmed by Congress. And this board of governors,

the purpose of this board of governors, is to sort of run all of it. Now, they're running all of this at a macro level. Each of those 12 Federal Reserve banks also have their own board of directors and their own structures that each run all of the different banks. So this is comprehensive. and again, why talking about the Federal Reserve is so complicated.

If you just like start looking at political stuff people have written about the Federal Reserve, it's a nightmare. Like if you try to like do your own research, your options are, unless you know where to look, right? Your options are the Federal Reserve itself, which is actually not a terrible resource for the most part because, again, conducting economic research is why. one of the points of the Federal Reserve, but it's not ideal.

And then also, immediately, you get a bunch of very weird anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about sound money and the sort of Rand Paul people who want to eliminate the Federal Reserve because they're mad at the U.S. dollar not being based on gold.

Nightmare. Terrible. Zero out of ten, we absolutely hate it. Now, speaking of things that we absolutely hate, it is not buying these products and services. The moments that shape us often begin with a simple question. What do I want my life to look like now? I'm Dr. Joy Harden-Bradford. And on therapy for Black Girls, we create space for honest conversations about identity,

relationships, mental health, and the choices that help us grow. As cybersecurity expert, Camille Stewart Gloucester reminds us, We are in a divisive time where our comments are weaponized against us. And so what we find is a lot of black women are standing up and speaking out because they feel the brunt of the pain. Each week we explore the tools and insights that help you move with purpose. Whether you're navigating something new or returning to yourself. If you're ready for thoughtful guidance and grounded support, this is the place for you. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast.

podcast or wherever you get your podcast. You know Roll Doll, the writer who thought up Willie Wonka, Matilda, and the BFG. But did you know he was also a spy? Was this before he wrote his stories? It must have been. Our new podcast series, The Secret World of Roll Doll, is a wild journey through the hidden chapters of his extraordinary, controversial life. His job was literally to seduce the wives of powerful Americans. What?

And he was really good at it. You probably won't believe it either. Okay, I don't think that's true. I'm telling you. I was a spy. Did you know Dahl got cozy with the Roosevelt's? Played poker with Harry Truman and had a long affair with a congresswoman. And then he took his talents to Hollywood,

where he worked alongside Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock before writing a hit James Bond film. How did this secret agent wind up as the most successful children's author ever? And what darkness from his covert past seeped into the stories we read as kids. The true story is stranger than anything he ever wrote. Listen to the secret world. Roald Dahl on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

The social media trend that's landing some Gen Z years in jail. The progressive media darling whose public meltdown got her fired. I'm going to take Francesco off the network entirely. The massive TikTok boycott against Target that makes no actual sense. I will continue getting stuff from Target. And I will continue to not pay for it. And the MAGA influencers, whose trip to the White House ended in embarrassment. So refreshing to have the press secretary after the last few years who's both

intelligent and articulation. You won't hear about these online stories in the mainstream media, but you can keep up with them and all the other entertaining and outrageous things happening online in media and in politics with the Brad versus Everyone podcast. Hosted by me, Brad Palumbo. Every day of the week, I bring you on a wild ride through the most delulu takes on the internet, criticizing the extremes of both sides from an independent perspective. Join in on the insanity and listen to the Brad versus Everyone podcast on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Like if we're on the air here and I literally have my contract here,

and I'm looking at, you know, as soon as I sign this, I'm going to get a seven-figure check. I've told them I won't be working here in two weeks. From the underground clubs that shaped global music to the pastors and creators who built a cultural empire. The Atlanta Ears podcast uncovers the stories behind one of the most influential cities in the world. The thing I love about Atlanta is that it's a city of hustlers, man.

Each episode explores a different chapter of Atlanta's rise, featuring conversations with ludicrous Will Packer, Pastor Jamal Bryan, DJ Drama, and more. The full series is available to listen to now. I really just had never experienced anything like what was going on in the city as far as like, you know, seeing so many young, black, affluent, creatives, in all walks of life. The church had dwindled almost to nothing.

And God said, this is your assignment. And that's like how you know, like, okay, oh, you're from Atlanta for real. I ain't got to say too much. I'm a gradie, baby. Shut up. Listen to Atlanta is on the I Heart Radio app. Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. We are back.

So, all right, we've gone over the structure of the Federal Reserve. So what does the Federal Reserve actually do? And why are we talking about this at such length? If you know one thing about the Fed, it's that the Fed can print money, you may or may not. You remember the Fed printing money memes from 2020 in that sort of era. And this is one of the conceptions of the Fed that is true.

The Federal Reserve is the entity given power by the U.S. government to print money. So when dollar bills are created, the Treasury commissions the Fed to print the bills. Technically speaking, coins are submitted by the Treasury, which is a whole sideshow tangent that I had to cut out of this story because it's like 20 minutes long. but, you know, if you are holding a U.S. dollar, basically, the odds are very, very, very, very, very, very, very good. That what you were holding is technically a Federal Reserve note? Now, what does that mean, Mio, what is happening here?

Why is it the government doesn't print money? Why is it this quasi-private public entity that's printing the money? Now, what's happening here is slightly more complex than Fed Money printer. an American dollar is U.S. debt, right? What you are holding in your hand is a promise from the U.S. government to pay one dollar to the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve is having this money distributed and is having this debt distributed. And this is what U.S. currency is. It is based on debt held by, in this case, the Federal Reserve banks, which have been given a monopoly to print this debt as

Federal Reserve notes. And the Federal Reserve can just sort of create this. It's also worth noting that when we talk about the Fed creating money, I mean, obviously, like it prints money for stuff commissioned by the Treasury so you can have more bills in circulation. But most of the actual money that's being created or not created is, you know, this is all happening digitally. It is funds appearing in the bank accounts of the banks that use the Federal Reserve.

So the other thing you may have heard about the Fed is the Fed funds rate or what's called the Fed interest rates or you'll hear a bunch of talk about the Fed setting interest rates. So to understand what this is, we need to kind of take a step back and look at what these banks actually are. The way this is commonly described is that the Fed is the bank of banks, right? which is what a bank needs a loan, they go to the Federal Reserve, and banks put their money in the Federal Reserve,

and they use it to move their money around. That's true enough for our purposes. I should also state here that a lot of what I'm going to be saying this episode, particularly from here forward, is technically probably a simplification of what's actually happening because the mechanisms here are very, very complicated. it. But, okay, so the Fed interest rate, right? This is the thing that is the source of all of the tension here, right? What Trump is pissed about to a large extent is that he thinks that Fed interest rates

are too high, and he wants them to be lower because he thinks this will cause the economy to grow more. So, okay, what does that mean? What is the Fed interest rate? The way this is explained to the public is that the Fed sets the cost of borrowing. That's like true kind of basically. There is a rate that is decided on by the Federal Reserve Board. On a more technical level, though, it's slightly more complicated than that. So when you hear someone talk about the Fed's interest rate, what they are talking about is the federal funds rate, and technically what they're talking about is the target federal funds rate. So I'm going to quote from the Federal Reserve itself, quote, the effective federal funds rate is the interest rate at which depository institutions,

banks, savings institutions, thrifts, and credit unions, and government-sponsored enterprises borrow from and lend to each other overnight to meet short-term business needs. The target for the federal funds rate, which is set by the federal open market committee, has varied widely over the years in response to prevailing economic conditions. So, yeah, also, by the way, it is technically the federal open market committee that sets the fund rate. But, okay, when we're talking about the Fed setting the interest rates, right, there's kind of two things going on. So the effective federal funds rate, which is the thing that they're trying to, trying to control is the interest rate at which all of these different banks that have their

money in here are all using it to lend to each other overnight through the money they have the Federal Reserve. They're all lending it to each other. The average of the rate of interest at which they're lending to each other overnight, the average of that rate is the federal funds rate. When people talk about like the interest rate is like 3.2% or whatever, what the Fed is trying to do is make sure that at the end of the night, this effective federal funds rate, which is the rate that all these banks are lending each other money at is at that rate. But they don't actually technically directly have control of this because it is, to be clear, the average rate of which all these banks are lending to each other,

what the Fed is manipulating directly usually is the interest on reserve balances or IORB. So this is the thing the Fed does control. The interest on reserve balances is how much interest they pay out for just putting your money in the Fed and leaving it. there. I'm going to quote the Fed again. The Fed's primary tool for influencing the federal funds rate is the interest the Fed pays on funds that banks hold as reserve balances at their federal reserve bank, which is the interest on reserve balances rate. Because banks are unlikely to lend funds in the federal funds market for less than they get paid on their reserve

balances at the Federal Reserve, the interest rate on reserve balances is an effective tool for guiding the federal funds rate. Okay, Mia, you've been spouting gibberish for many minutes now. What the fuck does that mean? So what the Fed is normally doing is... All right, so you put your money in a bank, right? And that bank has an interest rate

and it pays you out that amount of interest at the end of the year, right? And that's the money that you are making for putting your money in this corporation. The Fed also has their own interest on reserve balances so that they have their own interest rate for how much money you can get

from just leaving your money in the Federal Reserve. And the theory, and this is like, you know, true, is that banks aren't going to lend each other money at interest rates that are lower than what you can get from the Fed because otherwise you just leave your money in the Fed and you get that amount of money.

So if you're going to, you know, loan someone something, right, the interest that's being charged, tier is going to be higher than the Fed rate. And that's when we talk about Fed setting interest rates. That's what's happening on a technical level. And this is actually very important in the global economy because what this does, and this is where everything gets extremely murky and I'm going to go to a very, very high level of abstraction down from sort of the very low technical details.

Now, in theory, what this means is this is how easy it is to obtain money to like invest in stuff, right? This sets the rate at which you can borrow money. And in theory, if you have a very, very low interest rate, right, if the Fed funds rate is really low, then it's very, very cheap and easy to get a bunch of money and that money flows to the economy. And theoretically, that money will, you know, be used to invest in stuff and that will increase economic growth. Okay, so why wouldn't the Fed rate just always be zero? And the answer to that is that the Fed is an institution, and this is part of its legal framework that established it, is also trying to control inflation. And the theory effectively is that if you leave these things for too low for too long,

it will cause inflation and it will cause economic bubbles that are not actually supported by the return on investment, because if you can just always continuously borrow money for zero dollars, then you can just invest in anything as long as the return is like slightly more than like nothing. However, comma, raising interest rates is used as a way to try to slow economic growth in order to not have inflation result, right? And also to not have there be sort of speculative bubbles. And right now, we've entered a period in which interest rates have been rising after a pretty prolonged period of interest rates being effectively zero, like following the 2008 financial collapse. They've been really low for like a while for some stuff in the 90s that

we're going to get to later. But this is basically the primary dispute, which is that, okay, now obviously the Fed is to some extent a political actor. But the question here is who is going to get to set these sort of interest rates, right? Is it going to be the president of the United States, right? Is it going to be that Donald Trump can just be like, oh, economy look bad, turn down the interest rate? Or is it going to be the Federal Reserve itself, which is how it presently functions running this. That's what Fed independence means. So what is at stake here is one of the defining,

the defining mechanisms of sort of economic control, of control over the function of the economy. You know, this is called like a macroeconomic policy level, right? This is one of the largest, most important, and most powerful tools that exists in the entire world economy for managing and regulating the American economy. And the question is, is this going to remain with this sort of quasi-technocratic independent staff

or is it going to be directly set by the presidents? And that is a huge fucking deal because, as you mentioned, the last time I talked about this, there have been times where presidents have gotten control over central banks. For example, the sort of scare story that everyone is talking about is Turkey,

where Erdogan, they're effectively dictatorially, managed to break the independence of his own central bank and inflation rates are now merely 40%. So this is what's at stake. It's who gets to control this thing. Is it Donald Trump or is it the Federal Reserve? Now, we are going to go to ads and we are going to come back and talk a bit more about some of the nightmares that can happen here. The moments that shape us often begin with a simple question. What do I want my life to look like now? I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford. And on therapy for Black Girls, we create space for honest conversations about identity, relationships,

mental health, and the choices that help us grow. As cybersecurity expert, Camille Stewart Gloucester reminds us, we are in a divisive time where our comments are weaponized against us. And so what we find is a lot of black women are standing up and speaking out, because they feel the breadth of the pain. Each week we explore the tools and insights that help you move with purpose. Whether you're navigating something new or returning to yourself.

If you're ready for thoughtful guidance and grounded support, this is the place for you. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. You know, Roaldahl, the writer who thought up Willie Wonka,

Matilda, and the BFG. But did you know he was also a spy? Was this before he wrote his stories? It must have been. Our new podcast series, The Secret World of Roll Doll, is a wild journey through the hidden chapters of his extraordinary, controversial life.

His job was literally to seduce the wives of powerful Americans. What? And he was really good at it. You probably won't believe it either. Okay, I don't think that's true. I'm telling you. I was a spy.

Did you know Doll got cozy with the Roosevelt's? Played poker with Harry Truman and had a long affair with a congresswoman. And then he took his talents to Hollywood. where he worked alongside Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock before writing a hit James Bond film. How did this secret agent wind up as the most successful children's author ever? And what darkness from his covert past seeped into the stories we read as kids.

The true story is stranger than anything he ever wrote. Listen to the secret world of Roll Dahl on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The social media trend that's landing some Gen Zier is in jail. The progressive media darling whose public meltdown got her fired. going to take Francesco off the network entirely. The massive TikTok boycott against Target that makes no actual sense.

I will continue getting stuff from Target and I will continue to not pay for it. And the MAGA influencers whose trip to the White House ended in embarrassment. So refreshing to have the press secretary after the last few years who's both intelligent and articulate. You won't hear about these online stories

in the mainstream media, but you can keep up with them and all the other entertaining and outrageous things happening online in media and in politics with the Brad versus Everyone Podcast hosted by me, Brad Palumbo. Every day of the week, I bring you on a wild ride who the most delulu takes on the internet, criticizing the extremes of both sides from an independent perspective.

Join in on the insanity and listen to the Brad versus Everyone podcast on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Like if we're on the air here and I literally have my contract here and I'm looking at, you know, as soon as I sign this, I'm going to get a seven-figure check. I've told them I won't be working here in two weeks. the underground clubs that shaped global music to the pastors and creators who built a cultural empire. The Atlanta Ears podcast uncovers the stories behind one of the most influential cities in the world. The thing I love about Atlanta is that it's a city of hustlers, man.

Each episode explores a different chapter of Atlanta's rise, featuring conversations with Ludacris, Will Packer, Pastor Jamal Bryant, DJ Drama, and more. The full series is available to listen to now. I really just had never experienced anything like what was going on in the city as far as like, you know, seeing so many young, black, affluent, creatives, in all walks of life. The church had dwindled almost to nothing. And God said, this is your assignment.

And that's like how you know, like, okay, oh, you're from Atlanta for real. I ain't got to say too much. I'm a grader, baby. Shut up. Listen to Atlanta is on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Now, okay, so we've been talking mostly about the Fed interest rate because that is most of what it does. or that's not most of what it does that's the most important thing

that it does on a political level in terms of you know this is why Donald Trump wants it however the Fed does a bunch of other shit like for example a whole bunch of the world's gold supply owned by a bunch of countries

across the world sits in a vault under the Federal Reserve building the Fed has a balance sheet right of like the assets that it owns and that balance sheet is right now about $6.5 trillion, the payment system that the Fed maintains has $2 trillion a day moving through it, right? This payment infrastructure, the infrastructure of the Federal Reserve is the core of the functioning of the entire American banking system.

Like, I cannot emphasize this enough. And this is also, you know, important. on a macro international level, right? Like, this institution, functioning sort of normally, is the difference between capitalism working kind of normally, which is not good, but is working, and it's not working. And Trump is trying to take control of it. And again, this is a guy who wants to invade Greenland, and he is trying to take control over one of the most powerful economic institutions

that has ever existed in human history. So these are the sort of the stakes of the fight that's happening here, because again, the Fed is supposed to be an independent entity, right? The president is not supposed to be able to order the Fed to just do whatever it wants. And this is what's at stake with Trump trying to fire one of these Reserve Board presidents, with Trump trying to prosecute the current head of the Federal Reserve and use that threat to bring the Fed into line with doing what he wants to do? Now, Trump is also, again, attempting to install his own guy when Jerome Powell's term as

the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board ends. And, okay, in terms of could the Trump administration actually run this, right? I'm going to read this quote from actually a very good Yahoo story about the search for Trump's knew who he wants to run the Federal Reserve. This is starting with a quote from Trump's Treasury Secretary Scott Bessett, who's been the guy who is running the candidate search. Quote, who can bring the board along with them? Who has the gravitas, Bessett said?

Who is going to have an open, green span-like mind that we could be going through a productivity boom like we did in the 90s and not just throw the breaks because we're alarmed at a high GDP number. Okay, if you have spent your life closely following American macroeconomic policy, that is nuts. That is a terrifying statement. Utterly horrifying. Now, Mia, why is it scary to say that he wants a Greenspan-like mindset

that doesn't throw the brakes on the economy because they're alarmed by a GDP number? Why is that scary? And this is also, you know, why is it scary for the Trump administration to have direct control the Federal Reserve? Part of the reason we haven't had a full-scale economic collapse since 2008 has been that there has been a bunch of very, very careful management of the economy by the Federal Reserve, right? They have done a lot of technical stuff. You know, I'm saying they've done a lot of technical stuff.

When I say well, I mean, for the functioning of capital, like you and me and everyone listening to this. Is it working for us? No, not really, but it's working for capital, right? And they've been able to prevent an economic collapse through a lot of sort of technical means in 2020. And you see this now, they did these things called overnight repo injections where they would pump like $100 billion in liquidity into the bank markets overnight in order to make sure there was liquidity to, because that was one of the things that caused 2008 collapse. So they've been doing a bunch of very careful management, some of it in these large swings that have very little public attention, some of it in just the way they've been doing policy.

What these guys want to do is the Greenspan stuff from the 90s. So, okay, Mia, what the fuck is that? So what you're talking about is the Greenspan put? Now, what happened to the 90s to simplify the story a little bit, but I'm not even really simplifying it much, every time the market went down, Greenspan would just lower the interest rate to make the market go back up. Right. So every single time it even sort of looks like the market might be going down. He makes the cost of borrowing from the Fed cheaper so you can just take more money out of the

Federal Reserve and plunge that money back into the stock markets. Right. That's the theory here. The economist Robert Brenner called it Asset Keynesianism. This is something we have talked about on the show many, many, many times. And it is, to a large extent, the thing responsible for the 2008 economic collapse and also the dot-com bubble before that. and arguably also the Asian market collapses in the 90s. Okay, you know, you're dealing with a problem, which is that you don't have a manufacturing economy that can support economic growth. So what are you going to do instead?

Okay, we're going to give everyone a bunch of money so they can do speculative investing in stocks, and we're going to give everyone a bunch of money so that they can go invest in the housing market because housing prices will only ever go up. And that's the thing that these people want to do, right? And in terms of why, okay, why should you be scared about this, right? This is like saying that, okay, we need to bring back the guys who did all of the, like, mortgage-backed securities in 2008 that went up and put them in charge of, like, the world's most powerful economic institution.

So the candidates that Trump is talking about putting in place, I don't know if any of them are going to make it right now because I think the kind of person Trump is looking for is not the kind of person who like runs this kind of thing normally. In terms of like what Trump would do with the guy that he sort of installed there, we can look at who they've already installed. Right. And the one Federal Reserve Board member that Trump has successfully gotten in place is Stefan Mirren, who, and I cannot emphasize this enough,

I talk about how nuts this guy is all the time. This is the guy who wants other countries to pay taxes. on holding U.S. bonds. And this is the guy that, again, is now one of the governors of the Federal Reserve War because Trump put him there. I could spend another 40 minutes ranting about how bad of an idea his Mar-a-Lago Accords, which is his version of the Plaza Accords, would be it's gibberish, it's atrocious. And these people are simply not good enough at technical economic management to be put in

charge of the Federal Reserve, the most powerful economic agency in the entire world. And again, as I've been saying, right, the economic management has been good for capital. Has it been good for us? Like, no, not really. However, comma, putting that power directly into the hands of Donald Trump is an even worse idea. But it's also very important that this has been good for capital because Fed independence is the red line for a lot of very, very powerful sectors of capital. who would be fine with things like, like Trump could do public executions in the streets

and like GP Morgan eventually would be okay with it, right? J.P. Morgan is like panicking over this Federal Reserve stuff. So this is actually a line at which segments of capital are willing to break with Trump because this is an existential threat to them. Now, before I sort of close this out, you know, I've been giving what is essentially

a very conventional analysis, of what the Federal Reserve is, because to some extent you need a conventional analysis of what the Federal Reserve is to understand what the fuck is going on with these board things. But I want to give the final word to the anthropologist David Graber.

This is from his book, Debt the first 5,000 years. Quote, one element, however, tends to go flagrantly missing in even the most vivid conspiracy theories about the banking system, let alone in official accounts,

that is the role of war and military power. There's a reason why the wizard has such a strange capacity to make money out of nothing. Behind him, there is a man with a gun. True, in one sense, he's been there from the start. I have already pointed out that modern money is based on government debt and that governments borrow money in order to finance wars. This is just as true today as it was in the age of King Philip II. The creation of central banks represented a permanent institutionalization of that marriage between the interests of warriors and financiers that had already begun to emerge in Renaissance Italy and that eventually became the foundation of financial capitalism.

And this is something that's very, very important, right? We've been talking about how important the Fed is as an economic institution. And obviously, the importance of the Federal Reserve is tied in with the fact that the dollar is the world's reserve. currency, which makes it the most important currency on Earth. It means that every other country is doing a bunch of transactions denominated in American dollars. And it turns out when you can make American dollars, that is an enormous advantage for you. But this is all based on American military power, right? The reason that the dollar is the world reserve currency is because all of the countries that had competing currencies that could have been the international

standard were sort of annihilated during World War II. And at the end of World War II, it was the United States left standing with the richest and most powerful economy on earth, yes, but also like it was the country with nukes and the largest army that wasn't the Soviets, right? The element here that Graber is pointing out, right, is that the debt that you and me and everyone is like carrying out our day-to-day stuff with is war debt. Literally, the thing that we used to like buy groceries is to a large extent. It's a tiny bit more complicated than this, but like it's loads that were taken out

to like go bomb Vietnam. And part of what's happening under the Trump administration is that all of the things that used to be under the table, right? The U.S. you know, always had the kind of military power that Trump is sort of throwing around to try to, you know, invade Greenland or just kidnapped the president of Venezuela and run the country by gunboat. The U.S. has always had the ability to do this.

It's just that it was largely agreed upon by everyone involved running the system that using this power under the table was more effective than using it openly. The Trump administration thinks that, you know, using soft power or not explicitly just like saying we're going to invade you is like womanly pussy cuck shit. Like that's effectively what's happening here. And these people think that these people think that these. relationships need to be drawn out into the open, right? And so what we're left with here is a war between two sectors of capital, one of which wants to immolate the world to satisfy the ego of a

tyrant, and the other of which wants to let climate change immolate the world slightly slower because doing anything about climate change would hurt their bottom line, but allowing the God King to emulate the world by himself would hurt their bottom line too. And this is effectively the problem with the moment that they're in, which is that neither of these institutions, right, Donald Trump is not on your side. The Federal Reserve is also not on your side. What is necessary here, though, is not for sort of Comrade Federal Reserve to join us. What is necessary here for our purposes is that enough sectors of capital when the time comes, right? When Trump, finally does something and when there's a popular reaction of that forces a confrontation between Trump and the American people.

When that time comes, what is necessary is that these massive and powerful economic institutions stand aside and not defend the regime. This is, as I've talked about, to a significant extent on this podcast, this is how the Bolsheviks won their revolution.

It's also how the February revolution won, which was that large portion, of the populace, large portions of the ruling class, and to some extent, large portions of the state simply sat the conflict out because they didn't particularly like the revolutionaries, but they also weren't going to go die for some random tyrant. And that, in the end, is what's important about this conflict, right? There is, on the one hand, the possibility of Donald Trump just emulating the entire economy. And on the other, there is the possibility of these people standing aside when we attempt to build a world where we are not being lit on fire for

profit. This has been It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, Coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. I didn't really have an interest of being on air, I kind of was up there to just try and infiltrate the building. From the underground clubs that shaped global music to the pastors and creatives who built the cultural empire, the Atlanta Ears podcast uncovers the stories behind one of the most influential cities in the world.

The thing I love about Atlanta is that it's a city of hustlers, man. Each episode explores a different chapter of Atlanta's rise, featuring conversations with ludicrous, Will Packer, Pastor Jamal Bryant, DJ Drama, and more. The full series is available to leave. listen to now. Listen to Atlanta is on the I Heart Radio app. Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. The social media trend is slanding some Gen Ziers in jail. The progressive media darling whose public meltdown got her fired and the massive TikTok boycott against Target that actually makes no sense. You won't hear about these online stories in the mainstream media that you can

keep up with them and all the other entertaining and outrageous things happening online in media and in politics with the Bread versus Everyone podcast. Listen to the Brad versus Everyone podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.