Good morning from the Financial Times. Today is Friday, October 22nd, and this is your FT News Briefing.

The US Federal Reserve's banning top officials from making individual financial trades, former US President Donald Trump plans to capitalize on his massive following with a new social media company

that's just merged with a SPAC. And while central banks around the world are raising interest rates, Turkey's central bank just slashed its.

President Erdogan, he's no fan of high interest rates. He's described high interest rates as the mother and father of all evil.

That is, of course, our markets editor, Katie Martin. If a great chat lined up with her, she'll entangle what's going on in Turkey and this week's crazy story involving the cryptocurrency company, Tether.

I'm Mark Filipino and here's the news you need to start your day.

A few weeks ago, two top federal officials resigned after it came out that they had made questionable financial trades.

The trades took place last year, just as the US Central Bank was ushering in pandemic monetary policies that would turbo charge markets and asset prices.

Now, at the time, there was nothing in the Fed's rulebook preventing these officials from making these trades, but yesterday the Fed changed all that.

It banned its policy makers and senior staff from buying individual shares and a number of other investments.

The FT's Washington bureau chief, James Politi, explains why it moves so quickly.

Some of the criticisms of these financial trades really kind of attack kind of the heart of the Fed's credibility as it sets policy.

If there's any sort of whiff of conflicts of interests or officials trading based on what they know or based on where they expect the markets to go, then it's certainly very damaging.

I think the other reason it was important for the Fed to act quickly is because the White House is in the midst of deciding the fate of sort of the future leadership of the US Central Bank.

Jay Powell's term as Fed Chair expires in early February and on Capitol Hill, the revelations about these financial trades have certainly led to increased criticism and scrutiny of Powell and the rest of the Fed.

So I think it was important for him to tackle this sort of very quickly.

James Politi is the FT's Washington bureau chief.

This week, Donald Trump announced he's launching his own online media platform.

It'll compete with Twitter and Facebook, both of which ban the former US president from their platforms.

Trump will theoretically be able to tweet from his own social media site, which he promises will have non-woke content.

Now, the company behind Trump's new site is called Trump Media and Technology Group.

The former president's company is set to secure a public market listing after merging with something called a special purpose acquisition vehicle or SPAC.

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