Shut down or the Federal Reserve. Shut down or the Federal Reserve. We're going to go

Federal Reserve. From American Publicahl. It is Wednesday today. This one is the first of October. Good as always to have you along, everybody.

Interestingly, the macroeconomic story of this Wednesday is not the government shutdown. It is bad and it is not a great

way to run the world's most important economy, but big picture, it is probably just going to be a

ripple. The big picture, big news, is that the Supreme Court this morning said Lisa Cook can stay

at the Federal Reserve at least until it hears arguments in that case in January and then decides. So it's lucky for us that we were able to get another Fed official on the phone. Today, Austin, Gouldsby, is the president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Awesome, welcome back to the program. Kai, great to talk to you again. I have to start with Elisa Cook News, obviously, the Supreme Court this morning, as I said in the introduction, is letting her stay in the office at least tell arguments on this case in January. I'm going to, I really dislike prefacing questions, but I kind of have to at this point. Every time I ask a Fed governor or a regional Fed president like yourself about the politics of this economy,

the invariable answer is it doesn't affect things at all. It is simply not believable that the

tumult around the Federal Reserve and politics right now with Stephen Mirren and Governor Cook

is not at least somewhere in your mind., discuss. Well, let's separate two different things.

One is what drives FOMC decisions around the table when we're setting interest rates? And there,

everyone takes the job extremely seriously and what drives interest rate decisions is the economic outlook and the data and what the economic conditions are.

In this, I'm not a lawyer.

I don't know anything about the cases that are being made or going to Supreme Court.

I do know that the Fed needs to be independent

from political interference when setting interest rates is as simple as that. Do you worry that

independence is at risk now? I don't worry because, A, I'm not a worrier type, but B, as I say, when you sit around the table

at the FOMC, my observation is people take the job extremely seriously. And so I have no

reason to think that won't continue. All right. Let me get you back into your comfort zone.

And I ask you this question, as you have described yourself many a time on this program as a data dog. We are, as you know, in the middle of a government shutdown, early stages. We're not going to get the jobs number on Friday. You are a data dog. How worried are you about the shutdown in this economy and your ability at the central bank to figure out what the heck is going on.

Yeah, look, the data dogs are howling because we're not getting our usual supply of information.

I will say, I consider the Bureau of Labor Statistics job data to be the absolutely best data source on jobs and statistics in the

entire world. If we aren't going to have those, it's problematic. That said, the Chicago

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