This is the Tom Hartman Program.

And welcome back, Tom Hartman here with you.

On the line with us is the Senior Economist for the Center for Economic and Policy Research,

which he co-founded back in 1999, Dean Baker.

The author of several books including Rigged, Globalization and the Rules of the Modern

Economy or Structure to Make the Rich, Richer, you can read his blog at Beat The Press.

CEPR.net is the website for the Center for Economic and Policy Research, CEPR.net.

You can tweet Dean at Dean Baker 13.

Dean Baker, welcome back to the program, it's been a long time, thanks so much for joining

us.

I'm curious your thoughts as both an economist and as an observer of the political scene

and a very thoughtful commentator on how these rules are structured and how they work

on Jerome Powell and the Fed.

I've been writing about this recently, of course, it's been calling the Fed closely for

more than a quarter century.

I think Jerome Powell has really made a sea change at the Fed, he's made a commitment

to full employment and basically shifted the priorities of the Fed in a very, very fundamental

way.

Still for decades, the Fed's view has been that they're concerned about inflation and

employment was at best secondary and there have been many times, I could go through, you

don't want him to go through all the times, but there have been many times where the Fed

raised interest rates to slow the economy, mean fewer jobs, throw people out jobs or

...