A shadow looms over the Fed

Make Me Smart June 3, 2024 Transcript

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Kai Ryssdal 

All right. Whinging done.

Kimberly Adams 

Whinging. That’s a nice word.

Kai Ryssdal 

I like that word. I like that word. Good word. Better than whining.

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah. But is it functionally different?

Kai Ryssdal 

I think it’s the same actually.

Kimberly Adams

Okay.

Kai Ryssdal

I don’t know. I think it’s more like a British thing. Jayk’s like, yeah whatever. Make it up or something.

Kimberly Adams 

Well, since American media seems to love the Brit so much.

Kai Ryssdal 

Oh, I know. Are you kidding me? I know. Alright, let’s go. Let’s go.

Kimberly Adams 

Hello everyone, I’m Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where we make today make sense.

Kai Ryssdal 

I’m Kai Ryssdal. Thanks for joining us. It is Monday today, the third day of June.

Kimberly Adams 

Today, we are going to do some news, and then get to some smiles. Let’s start with the news. Kai, you should go first.

Kai Ryssdal 

So, I’ve got two ones. Just a quick update. We were talking the other day about Boeing and its challenges launching its Starliner space capsule, and I was just talking about the difference between how Boeing has handled a standard, you know, fixed government contract versus SpaceX. And the short answer is that SpaceX is doing really well, and Boeing is not. Anyway, they scrubbed over the weekend, even with that leak that we were talking about. Now, it’s scheduled for June the fifth, just for you space dorks out there. It’s another little sort of thing that’s happening. I just thought it was hmm.

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah, I mean, I don’t know why the big sigh. It’s just there’s so much else going on, and as much as I love space, I’ve just not engaged as much with this even though it’s super exciting. And even with the Artemis missions and the updates on those, it’s just like, I want to care. But I’m kind of overloaded on the number of things that I can care about at any given one point in time.

Kai Ryssdal 

Yeah, no, I feel that. I feel that. Anyway. So, that’s a quick update. The more substantive item, and I think we’ve talked about this on the pod. I know I’ve talked about this on the pod before about what’s going to happen to the Federal Reserve if there is a second Trump administration. And I just point this out as another data point in the lookout this could get ugly theory of the case, which is mine. Here’s just the lead from Bloomberg: “The Federal Reserve will face a significant risk of losing its independence to ramped-up political interference if Donald Trump is elected president again,” that is, “according to the latest Bloomberg Markets Live Pulse survey.” Now, I don’t know anything about the metrics and the methodology of that survey. But it’s not too far outside the realm of the possible that if Donald Trump is elected again, to the Federal Reserve, to the presidency. No, no Freudian slip intended there. The Federal Reserve will be in some jeopardy. The Wall Street Journal had actual reporting a number of months ago talking about the plans that Trump’s people have, and this is now the market coming to believe that that will be true. And look, it would be a very bad thing, say what you will about the Federal Reserve and how it uses a lot of its powers in ways that were perhaps not intended in the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. But it has saved our bacon at some cost at least twice over the last 15 years. And if the Federal Reserve is constrained in time of crisis, right? We’re not talking about, you know, regular interest rate stuff, although we are that a little bit. But if it is constrained in times of crisis by political interference, that’s very bad. That’s very, very, very, very bad. And if the market is coming to believe that. Sorry, I gave you the pause. I know I did the pause, and then I kept going. And you’re like, okay, he’s done. But anyway, that would be bad. I’m done. Kimberly Adams, over to you.

Kimberly Adams 

So, when we talked about it last time, remember, I was getting ready to talk to Trump economic adviser Stephen Moore, like literally the next day. And I asked him specifically about this, and about the Fed losing its independence. And this is Trump’s senior economic adviser. And he said, I asked him specifically about the reporting. He was like, “No, that’s not really something that we’re planning on.” And I said, well, what about specifically this chart that, you know, that if Trump were in office, and he should have, you know, the right to get rid of the Federal Reserve president and that the Fed should be less independent. He said, “I think that’s a bad idea.” And I pressed him on it again, and he said if Trump were to win, Jerome Powell only has like another year in office, and I would advise him to let him serve out his term. So, for what it’s worth, the senior economic adviser said that it is not his advice to Trump to take away the Fed’s independence. That said, there’s lots of other people talking to former President Trump and at the end of the day, Trump is going to do what he’s going to. What he wants to do.

Kai Ryssdal

There you go. Yup.

Kimberly Adams

Just putting that out there.

Kai Ryssdal

Fair. Go ahead.

Kimberly Adams

Okay, so I’ve got two as well, the first one also elections, because we can’t stop talking about elections at this point. You know, at this point, I think it’s reasonable. I think it’s far enough into it. Axios has an article kind of laying out in detail something that I touched on when I was doing my reporting on election officials getting ready for the November election. And they are laying out sort of the other side of it, which is Republicans in particular, building up an army of lawyers to challenge the election and getting ready to fight the outcome. I’ll read some of this. “The RNC plans to hire more. Sorry, the Republican National Committee is assembling a network of lawyers and volunteers to gather string for lawsuits challenging the results of the November 5 vote. “The RNC plans to hire more people for the operation than for any other department it has, a committee official told Axios. The RNC has installed 13 ‘election integrity’ state directors who have been hosting training sessions with state and county GOP parties and swing states such as Pennsylvania, Arizona and Wisconsin. It’s also contracted with 13 in-state counsels to help identify local litigation opportunities. Beyond that, the Trump campaign and RNC plan to recruit and deploy 100,000 volunteers, law students and lawyers to serve as poll watchers and observers.” On the Democratic side, they’re “responding to the onslaught of GOP lawsuits with legal challenges of their own. The DNC and the Biden campaign are building out their own election litigation team to respond to GOP lawsuits.” Obviously, not as big. But just a reminder to folks that we will be paying for all of these election challenges. That means that your state and local election officials are going to have to be fighting these cases, hiring the lawyers, dealing with the public records requests. And I think there should be public records. I think our elections should be as transparent as they need to be, and people should have their rights to challenge. But a lot of this stuff is going to be frivolous, and intentionally frivolous to delay and to undermine people’s trust in the electoral process. And if you have friends and family who you think might be vulnerable to mis- and disinformation, now’s the time to start talking to them about what these legal challenges are likely to be, and why and how they are designed to mislead. So, just wanted to put that out there. Go ahead, I paused. You can go.

Kai Ryssdal 

So, not only are they intentionally frivolous, they are frivolous in malignant bad faith. There is, to be clear, zero, zero, zero evidence that there is widespread voter fraud at all.

Kimberly Adams 

And the most important thing is it’s never. Anytime there is any kind of evidence of any kind of election errors is what I’ll call them more often than not, it’s never enough to swing the outcome of an election ever. So, that was my big thing. The other thing is something that I’m a little bit annoyed at, myself included in the Washington press corps for kind of missing this. So, the FAA re-authorization bill was signed into law, right? And this was something that all the folks watching it were like, it needs to get done. This is a big deal. We’re paying attention to the fact that you know you need better air traffic control rules. We need to look at the pilot retirement, you know, ages and training opportunities and funding for different things. And this, that and the other. What I did not notice is that in that legislation just signed into law, as the headline in Gizmodo says, “Congress just made it basically impossible to track Taylor Swift’s private jet.” Now, I don’t care about that. However, I’m just going to read this here. “An amendment in the Federal Aviation Administration re-authorization bill that was passed last week,” week before last, “will allow private aircraft owners to anonymize their registration information.” And then it goes on to say: “Jet tracking has made been made possible up into this point because private plane owners were forced to register aircraft ownership information with the FAA civil registry. That registry has been public until now, allowing those data points to be combined with open radar mapping to understand where and when certain planes were traveling. It’s through this public information that online enthusiasts have been able to track the jet activity of America’s 1 percent.” Now, Taylor Swift had a compelling argument among other celebrities that having this information out there might make her subject to stalking or put her security at risk, even though she has a lot of money to pay for her security, along with her private jet. I think this is actually a real problem because, first of all, I think there’s been some really good climate reporting and challenging of folks on who are, you know, talking about sustainability, but then keeping up with that private jet lifestyle. I think some of that reporting has been useful. And I want to highlight some of the other things that we know about, thanks to having access to what rich people are doing with their private jets. The big one that jumped to my mind when I first thought of it was the ProPublica reporting on Clarence Thomas taking all those private jet trips with Harlan Crow. How were they able to know where Harlan Crow was going and line that up and where his jets were going, and line that up with what Clarence Thomas was doing? Because that information was public, and now it’s not going to be anymore and that is going to allow other things beyond celebrities maintaining their privacy, other things to be done in the dark, and I just wanted to flag that. I didn’t notice it. And when you and I get on here and complain about you know, journalism layoffs and shrinking newsrooms, and you know, oh, it’s so tough to be in journalism. The media market is garbage right now. This is the kind of stuff that slips through the cracks when we don’t have enough journalists watching.

Kai Ryssdal 

I wish to associate myself with the gentlelady’s remarks. I completely agree. Totally.

Kimberly Adams 

Well then. Let’s move on to our single smile.

Kai Ryssdal 

Just one but it’s a good one. You get to do it because you spotted it first, but it’s amazeballs.

Kimberly Adams 

I want to grow up and become Simone Biles. Like, she’s so beautiful, and she’s so strong and so talented and just like, an amazing person, and what she like, the way that she has made mental health a priority in her career and then came back and unashamed and unabashed. Love it. Love it. Love it. So, anyway. Reporting from the Associated Press and everywhere else that “Simone Biles cruises to a 9th national title and gives the Olympic champ Sunisa Lee a boost along the way.” I’m just going to read this because I think it was written nicely. “And maybe that’s the biggest difference between the national title the gymnastic star won Saturday night — her ninth, this one with an all-around total of 119.750 points,” which is ridiculous by the way, “and her first over a decade ago. Early on, and then it says: “The defining moment of her victory wasn’t a twist or turn or a jump, but of a walk. It came early on, when Biles watched Olympic champion and good friend Sunisa Lee spin awkwardly in the air during her vault and landed on her back, a mixture of surprise and fear spreading across her face. ‘I was kind of thinking that this was over.’ Lee said. Then Biles appeared at her side, unprompted. She knew exactly where Lee was in that moment better than anyone.” Biles went through the same thing and knew what it was like, you know, and the fact that she’s not only doing all these amazing things for herself. And go and watch some of these performances. They’re astonishing, but also supporting her teammates and just being such a huge example. I think it’s really great, and I love watching her perform.

Kai Ryssdal 

Me too. Also, and this is the part that blew me away. So, this is ninth in a row or ninth out of however many she’s done. Also, she’s 27, which is like, old.

Kimberly Adams 

Ancient in gymnastics.

Kai Ryssdal 

I know. I mean, it’s amazing.

Kimberly Adams 

And just blowing everybody away. I was watching some of the commentary and they were, you know, talking about her vaults and how, you know, the scores were so high, they’re like, yeah, you’re not going to see any numbers even close to this the rest of the competition. Yeah, yeah. So, go watch that. Go watch those performances. They’re great. But anyway, that’s it for us today. You can join us tomorrow, I hope you will, for a weekly deep dive. This week we are going into the world of polling ahead of this year’s election and actually now because the polling is ongoing. So, if you have questions about polling, how it works, how much we should trust it, go ahead and send those questions our way. We’re at 508-U-B-SMART or makemesmart@marketplace.org.

Kai Ryssdal 

Make Me Smart is produced by Courtney Berg. Today’s board. I’m sorry, Courtney. Courtney Bergsieker, that’s how you pronounce her name. Today’s program was engineered by Jayk Cherry. Ellen Rolfes writes our newsletter. Our intern is Thalia Menchaca.

Kimberly Adams 

Marissa Cabrera is our senior producer. Bridget Bodar is the director of podcasts. And Francesca Levy is the executive director of Digital.