Hello, everyone. I'm Kimberly Adams.

Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where we make today make sense.

It's Thursday, July the 31st.

And yesterday, if you've been listening to our shows, you know that the Federal Reserve

decided to leave its benchmark interest rate unchanged, despite a ton of

pressure from President Trump over the last few months to cut rates. Trump has accused a Federal Reserve

Chair Jerome Powell of mismanaging renovations at the Fed, along with taking too long to cut

interest rates. He's talked about

firing pal, which as we've talked about on here would have some pretty serious consequences.

So I wanted to bring on my colleague, Nancy Marshall Ginsburg, who also is one of our correspondents

here in Washington, D.C., and is our regular attendee at the Fed Press conferences.

She's joining me on the show today to share her takeaway from sitting in the room yesterday.

Hey, Nancy.

Hey, Kimberly.

So a little behind the scenes first.

What's it like in those press conferences?

You know, Kimberly, it's so interesting because the press conference was a lot more crowded than usual.

There are about four rows of journalists who sit facing the podium where Chair Powell is.

And there's a lot of jockeying for questions, but I did get called on to ask a question, so that was good.

Okay, we're going to get to that question in a little bit. But at that press conference yesterday, what did Powell say about why the Fed made its decision to leave rates unchanged? Basically,

he is not convinced that inflation is tamed yet.

And, you know, he kept saying inflation is not down to our 2% target yet.

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