Hello and welcome to Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week.

I'm Felix Salmon. I'm here with Elizabeth Spires. It's New York Times. Hello. I'm here with Emily Peck, with Axios. Hello. Emily has some fabulous news that she's going to drop at the end of the show. It's huge and awesome. But before we get there, we first need to introduce the one and only Cash Me at Hill. Cash, welcome. Thank you for having me. Cash, we love having you on this show, but for those of us who

don't remember the last time you're on, who are you? What do you do? I'm Kashmir Hill. I am

a features writer slash technology reporter at the New York Times. And you have been on a tear.

You had, what, three stories published in a week or something? Yeah, usually I publish like one story a month, so I'm exhausted. I'm glad people can't see me on the Zoom because my hair looks crazy. I've got like bags under my eyes. It's been a month. It's been a month, but we are all the better for it. You've done an amazing amount of

reporting on this chatbots and suicide and big, deep issues like that, which we are going to

talk about. We do, of course, need to talk about Fed independence as well, and this attack on

Lisa Cook, who's a Fed governor by President Trump, who's tried to fire her. So we're going to talk about all of that.

We have a slate last segment on Taylor Swift, of course, because we have to.

There's a rule about that.

It's all coming up on slate money.

So we need to start with the most important business and finance news of the week by far,

which is that the independence of the Federal Reserve is either under threat or kind of has already

been lost, depending on who you believe. Emily, bring us up to speed here and how, on a scale of like

one to ten, how much is your hair on fire right now? You can't see this in the Zoom, but my hair is on

fire. It's been on fire all week, at least, if not for longer, because President Trump really

escalated his push against the Federal Reserve, his fight to

set monetary policy for the United States, and thus the world this week, because he and Bill

Pulte, who runs the FHFA, the housing agency that oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have been on

this. It's a smear campaign.

It looks like against Fed Governor Lisa Cook. She's the first black woman to be a Fed governor ever,

and they are accusing her without much evidence of so-called mortgage fraud. But all they really

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