I'm John Batchel with my colleague, Professor John Cochran of the Hoover Institution, writing

at Grumpy Economist, that's his, he's not grumpy, blog, substack page, and he's reflecting

upon a history written up recently in an esteem publication that I don't come across, so I didn't

even know it existed until John brought it up in his article, a history of the

contest between the Federal Reserve and the White House. Here to four were given to the

understanding. Never happened like this. This is very unusual, completely out of time that the

president would be mocking and then attacking the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, or the Chairman of the Federal

Reserve would take to television on a Sunday night and say, this is a pretext to make me

change the interest rates.

That's what recently we saw Chairman Powell do that.

So we come to this article, the Treasury Fed Accord, a new narrative account by Robert

Hetzel and Ralph Leach. What's striking to me about this is that the word accord masks the tension

underneath. John, this is not 1951. Your reporting is that we have a trillion dollar payment on the debt.

That's before we spend any money on anything else, any program.

We spend a trillion dollars on interest rate.

That is clearly unimaginable in 1951.

But here we have it today.

And you say the analogies are Martin to Warsh and McCabe to Powell

and Truman to Trump. And yet they could not have known it wouldn't have been World War III.

Or with the COVID crisis, they could not have known that it would ebb eventually in a year or two.

But in both instances, there were different directions that the Federal Reserve chose to go from what the White House wanted.

So there's going to be another crisis.

...