From The Times and the Sunday Times, this is the story. I'm Manvine Rana.

It began with six influential men travelling in secret to a private island. They used only their first names and traveled

there separately so that they wouldn't be spotted. That secret meeting on Jekyll Island in Georgia

in 1910 between a senator and a group of bankers laid the foundations for what became the Federal Reserve.

The Federal Reserve, in really simple terms, is the US's central bank.

So it's the equivalent of the Bank of England or the European Central Bank.

Back in 1913, when the Fed was first established, it was trying to combat financial panics in the markets

and control how money flowed through the economy. Now, that tends to mean focusing on one thing.

A central bank mainly has one proper job, which is to monitor inflation in the economy

and to use its main tool interest rates to make sure inflation is not too low and it's not

too high.

The targets that most central banks have is 2%.

That is the sweet spot.

Unlike other central banks, though, the Fed doesn't just try to keep inflation in America in check.

It has a global impact.

After all, when America sneezes, the whole world catches a cold.

So when you're the central bank of the world's largest economy with the world's reserve currency,

you take on a kind of policeman role for the world's financial stability.

From the moment it was conceived, those six men on Jekyll Island knew that the Federal Reserve would have to be independent of the president for it to work and for the

market to have confidence in it. Which is why, more than a century later, the financial world

was stunned when President Trump published a letter on Truth Social on Tuesday, firing one of the governors of the Fed.

In an unprecedented move, President Trump announced he is firing Fed Governor Lisa Cook

...