This is Planet Money from NPR.

On Monday evening, Brendan Greeley is in his home office in Maryland, finishing up a book he's been working on forever.

I was sitting right here. I was sitting in this chair. This dog was sitting next to me.

I was editing a document that is still open about the creation of

Euro dollars. Brendan is getting his PhD at Princeton, and he has been studying the long,

long arc of financial history. His almost finished book is a 500-year history of the dollar.

But for 20 years, he was a journalist, a Fed watcher. He's covered

the Federal Reserve, the nation's central bank. So on Monday, he's working away. And you opened

blue sky to procrastinate. Yes, that's exactly what I did. I opened blue sky to procrastinate.

And that's when you saw it. And that's when I saw that Donald Trump had declared that he had fired Lisa Cook.

Dr. Lisa Cook is an economist.

She was appointed by President Biden to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.

She is the first and only black woman to hold this post.

And what Brendan is seeing on blue sky is that President Trump has just said he's firing her.

A president has never fired a member of the Fed Board of Governors before in history.

To do that legally, a president needs cause.

Basically, the person has to have done something wrong.

The president claims that Lisa Cook may have made false statements to get a better deal on her mortgages.

He says that's cause to fire her. Brendan told us the alleged wrongdoing is pretty small

potatoes. These are allegations on the level of, uh, did you lie about the size of your home office

in your tax returns? Not typically something that we root out and prosecute. In response,

Lisa Cook has filed a lawsuit and a judge held a hearing to consider her request to stay in her

...