This is John Batchel, a conversation with colleague Joseph Sternberg of the Wall Street Journal editorial page, writes political economics. He's in London, observing that both sides of the argument between the White House and the Federal Reserve Bank, both sides of the presentation by Mr. Trump for the White House and Mr. Powell for the Federal Reserve have problems.

One, the problem is that the reliability of the Federal Reserve making decisions,

the best for the American people as opposed to best for an election, is in question.

And then again, Mr. Powell, awaited, as Joseph reports, policy during the pandemic,

that is, was not his writ.

And there's much more about the mixing of roles between the Chairman of the Federal Reserve

and the President of the United States who did appoint Jerome Powell to the Federal Reserve.

Here's Joseph to explain.

Yeah, there is sort of an element of that, although, you know, I'm going to lay out briefly

sort of what that argument is and then point out that everyone deserves to lose here in one

form or another. So, I mean, it's

certainly true that most recently when Trump has been arguing for lower interest rates, one of the

arguments he makes is that, well, it is so expensive for the federal government to have

interest rates increasing, which is true because the debt is so large now, the increases

in interest rates that we've seen, particularly further out on the yield curve for treasury

bonds, is very expensive for treasury.

I think we're now spending more on interest payments on the debt

than we are on defense. So I think that this is absolutely true. And I think that there's a danger

that that does start sounding an awful lot like a fiscal dominance argument. And again,

I think that if you've stopped there, that would be a good argument for

preserving the Fed's independence. The problem was the Fed, under Jerome Powell, often has

participated in that kind of erosion itself. I mean, he was out there in 2020. Powell was arguing

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