The case for Fed independence in the Nixon tapes
Planet Money
NPR
4.6 • 30.5K Ratings
🗓️ 11 January 2025
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In today's episode, we listen back through the Nixon White House tapes to search for evidence of an alarming chapter in American economic history: When the President of the United States seemingly flouted the norms of Fed Independence in order to pressure the Chair of the Federal Reserve Board into decisions that were economically bad in the long run but good for Nixon's upcoming election.
The tale of Nixon and his Fed Chair, Arthur Burns, has become the cautionary tale about why Fed Independence matters. That choice may have started a decade of catastrophic inflation. And Burns' story is now being invoked as President-elect Trump has explicitly said he'd like more control over the Federal Reserve.
Help support Planet Money and hear our bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney.
See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.
NPR Privacy Policy
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Just a heads up, in this episode, a former president curses a few times. |
| 0:06.1 | This is Planet Money from NPR. |
| 0:11.6 | Secretly recorded audio from the White House. |
| 0:15.7 | Specifically, 1,527 hours of secretly recorded audio. |
| 0:22.7 | Yeah, by 2004, 1,500 hours of Oval Office visits, cabinet meetings, phone calls, |
| 0:30.2 | were now available for the public to listen to, the full unfiltered dump of the Nixon tapes. |
| 0:37.1 | Do you remember where you heard the announcement? |
| 0:38.6 | It was on the news. This is economist Burton Abrams. It was probably a newscast that talked about |
| 0:44.7 | the Nixon tapes. I said, this is what I've been waiting for. Because obviously everyone wants to |
| 0:50.1 | know about the dirty details, Watergate, the nonsense, the corruption. Well, everyone else was |
| 0:55.9 | interested in Watergate. I was interested in monetary policy. Popular man, I bet, you were. |
| 1:03.3 | Yeah. See, ever since Burton Abrams was just a grad school whippersnapper, he had hoped that the |
| 1:09.1 | Nixon tapes might solve a mystery that |
| 1:11.7 | he'd been somewhat obsessed with, a mystery that begins with a famous economist named Arthur Burns. |
| 1:17.7 | Arthur Burns had a reputation of being an extremely cautious monetary economist who had written |
| 1:26.8 | a book called Prosperity Without Inflation. |
| 1:31.0 | Prosperity without inflation. Burns discussed how inflation was caused by too much money |
| 1:37.5 | flowing through the economy, too much money chasing too few goods. And in 1969, |
| 1:42.7 | Richard Nixon appointed Burns, chairman of the Federal Reserve. |
| 1:46.5 | And then Burns did things at the Fed that frankly seemed like letting too much money flow |
| 1:52.0 | through the economy and chase too few goods. And all of a sudden, we get the worst decade of |
| 1:58.7 | inflation, probably in U.S. history. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from NPR, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of NPR and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.