This is a lightly edited transcript of the accompanying video from professor Peter St. Onge.
The Wall Street Journal is speculating that President-elect Donald Trump may fire Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell. Powell says he won’t go.
Can the president fire a Fed chief? And if not, who is actually running the Fed?
Trump appointed Powell in 2017, and has pretty much been at war with him ever since. Powell was appointed on the recommendation of his friend Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, a former hedge funder.
Powell himself is not actually an economist—he worked in private equity, which normally buys up companies and sells them for parts. But Powell worked for a conspiracy theorist’s fever dream, the Carlyle Group, featured in “Fahrenheit 9/11” as the crony poster child of the military industrial complex.
It’s a big club. And Trump was new to the…
