Someone who supports trump, please let me know the logic on this. Genuinely. I'm trying to read other places about these charges but they're just so slanted that they're not really trustworthy. Is there anything to this, or is it really just to pressure the federal reserve?
It is. What's more, such support is roughly the same across both parties, but both parties vastly overestimate the other side's support.
The difference between the two parties is that one elected a leader that agrees with that minority. This 2012 scene from The Newsroom outlines the difference:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGsLhyNJBh8
The GOP let (?) the inmates run the asylum.
How's this different than say...
>polls show 99% (or whatever) of people are against crime
>voters elect a soft-on-crime politician, crime goes up
>"I consider the fact that the soft-on-crime politicians got elected to have falsified all research that people are against crime"
Moving on to the actual video, if the implication is that someone says [absurd thing] on national TV, it must mean that the party (or its electorate) as a whole must support [absurd thing], then:
The guy end up apologizing, so what's the issue? I guess the expectation is that he should be canceled/fired or whatever? What about similarly absurd stuff from the left? It's not hard to find stuff like "racism = power + oppression" that's casually mentioned on npr or whatever without major pushback, even though most democrats don't believe in this type of stuff. Or is talking about killing people a special case? If so, what does that mean about discussions on the death penalty?
And you waive it away. 'Bro said my bad dude, what more do you want?'. You are literally Martin Niemöller:
First they came for the Communists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Communist ...
I thought they were upset about her emails or whatever?
In the context of the previous comment, the "non-rabbid" (and probably median) supporter would be someone voting Trump because they think they trust him more on the economy/immigration or whatever. They might be indifferent to his claims that he'll lock up his political opponents, or think that they're actually guilty of something, but that's not the same as being "rabbid" (ie. showing up to rallies and chanting "lock her up").
It’s a kleptocracy. He doesn’t care. He just wants cheap money from the Fed as patronage.
And many others will vote for system-wreckers (broadly: conservatives) again, because the democrats cannot fix much of the damage done within the next legislative periods, let alone just one... even if the miracle of a trifecta happens and SCOTUS loses its majority on top of it. Rinse, repeat.
I continue to be surprised by people who have seen things unfold as they have over less than a year of this administration and still somehow believe we'll continue to have "free and fair" elections anytime in the near future.
We have over, and over again seeing virtually all of the "checks and balances" we learned about as kids being overridden without consequence.
This community of all other should be aware of how easy it is to exert total control of information (I'm still surprised this article is on the home page). Everyone consumes almost all of their information through digital, corporate controlled means. Even people getting together a organically socializing in bars, something that was common 30 years ago, has been replaced with online interactions. Trump does not need mandate from the people to continue to rule the country.
> Trump Regrets Not Seizing Voting Machines After 2020 Election: In an interview, the president said he should have ordered the National Guard to take the machines
For decades he hasn’t had to tolerate “checks and balances”! Nobody could say “no” and retain their jobs under him.
The American public decided to put this type of person in charge.
The consequences were predicted.
There is even a more boring and obscure bit of plumbing, the Treasury payment system, that they/DOGE went after last year:
* https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/musks-doge-clash...
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42904200
* https://hn.algolia.com/?q=treasury+payment+system
Every knee must (forced to) bend.
So our monetary policy will be just set at the arbitrary whims of the president if this new scheme works.
Why does all of this feel like it's just sliding completely out of hand? Am I just being a doomer?
This outlet has some good things from time to time, like https://www.liberalcurrents.com/we-are-going-to-win/
That said, yeah this is really bad.
I’m applying to jobs in Europe.
I thought this post was a good one on why doomerism is just a waste of time - featuring Ken Jennings of Jeopardy fame:
https://bsky.app/profile/goldengateblond.bsky.social/post/3m...
Some accounts at random that tend towards "this all sucks really bad - however!"
https://bsky.app/profile/olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social
https://bsky.app/profile/golikehellmachine.com
It's a particular and kind of peculiar attitude, because objectively "things ain't great" and it's really easy to dwell on that. But we also need some hope.
Clearly, that is a problem that needs to be solved.
This move is public punishment for not falling in line.
None of us understand the devastation that a WW incurs.
Its time to put up or get put down by masked goons.
I am not a big fan of his earlier policies (or of Greenspan's and anyone after him for that matter). His "unlearn the importance of M2" did not age well. He made the tail end of the ZIRP more painful than it needed to be. But those were honest mistakes from a public servant who did his best and believed in what he is doing.
And standing up for what he believes is right, against this insanity from the president is the gold standard of what we need from public servants. My 2c.
His statement is firm and well articulated. I have nothing bad to say about the man right now
And anyone who is a hard-currency quantity-theory-of-money conservative, should also be appalled by it.
Trump is way worse than what the harshest critics of the Federal Reserve think about it. Nobody right or left should support it. Only the billionaires will profit off the monetary disorder.
Maybe not even them. Certainly not all of them.
Thank you, Mr. Powell. We really want interest rates set to serve the people, not the whims of the President.
"No. Neither does anyone else. Adventures happen to other people. When it happens to you, it just looks like trouble."
- The Ballad Of Sir Dinadan, by Gerald Morris, quoted from memory
Politics is now consumed as entertainment, and ask any writer of books or screenplays and they will tell you _conflict_ makes for good entertainment.
Politics should be _boring_. The fact that we demand to be entertained by our political system is a big part of the problem.
Both are basically useless as it relates to your personal quality of life but at least with the latter you can see nice geometric combinations between players on a pitch and some incredible athleticism in between
If your life can be impacted more than 5% by [ insert name of the person residing in the White House] then you are either a politician or someone not doing a proper job at navigating through life and hedge your bets (financial or otherwise)
Well doom is here. Congrats.
Look how quickly big business rolled over for The Felon--because they saw what mot people have been denying since the election.
Or labelled:
If the admin is fighting with the Federal Reserve, it means they are not focused on figuring out how to further screw us over…
> If the admin is fighting with the Federal Reserve, it means they are not focused on figuring out how to further screw us over…
Messing with interest rates for short term political gain would screw us over.
At some point it stops being steelmanning and starts becoming an invitation for some propaganda to distract from the obvious.
Inviting propaganda is good, let the obviously weak arguments come front and center to be logically considered and ridiculed rather than put in small private group chats where they seem to grow and grow. This only works, in any way, if people stop saying things aren't worth having consideration about because it's obvious to them.
> Inviting propaganda is good, let the obviously weak arguments come front and center to be logically considered and ridiculed
That's literally what I'm doing: Ridiculing the obviously weak arguments.
And do you know what's happening? My ridicule and dismissiveness are being talked down, while you invite someone to "steelman" the argument instead. This pattern happens over and over again in spaces where steelmanning is held up as virtuous: It's supposed to be a tool for bringing weak arguments into the light so they can be dismissed, yet the people dismissing are told to shush so we can soak up the propaganda from the other side.
I keep telling everyone and have been for a year, it’s not just our problem, due to global US positioning it’s now a world problem. Just ask Venezuela. Regardless of what you think about the end result the ends did not justify the means.
I for one will be collecting my (completely legal) hunting rifles and weapons I’ve had in storage since I was a kid, have them professionally serviced and grab some ammunition, on the terrible case I need to defend myself which I thought I’d never ever have to consider and I’d just sell them some day. But alas we have a lot of really really stupid as well as downright toxic voters in this country.
The outcome of this is all too predictable.
The cavalry is not coming, and this fire is going to take its course.
One day, maybe we will rebuild from scratch.
Wrong!! Please don’t say that! We all have power inside the US. Congress had the opportunity in 2021 to correct the wrong, but Republicans kowtowed and they are still doing so. That was the easy way. Now for the hard way, American people will have to do something about it.
Edit: Grammar
The current situation is bad, but this is just doomerism.
The current administration will end. Trump can't live forever. His approval rating is already low and falling.
We're in for a bumpy ride, but then it's going to start reverting toward the mean. Not necessarily back to the way things were, but periods of extreme like this are followed by a reversion to the mean more often than not.
"To say anything that challenges the current trajectory is doomerism. We're in for a bumpy ride for sure, but this will all correct itself. _it has to_."
After all that’s happened, his approval rating is still above 40%. Those people aren’t going away or changing their minds any time soon.
You need to know only two facts about America to guess that:
* Fifty three percent of Americans now read below the sixth grade level.
* As (ostensibly) a representative Democracy America's fate is dictated by the majority of it's citizens.
Our future is to become a broken nation governed by middle-school student level thinking. The only way to build a better America is to build a better populace, and that would be contrary to the interests of the angry, spoiled, children who seem to hold all the power now.
Just bought a new 5080 this week. Hoping I can hunker down in my cave for the next couple years and see what's left of the world in 2030.
Oh yea, beer, lots of beer.
The US government is entirely non-responsive and only nominally representative.
Barring a wave of Republican retirements in the House, the absolute soonest there are any guardrails are after the 2026 midterms when a new congress is seated in 2027.
The slimiest swampiest criminals, they need to be put on trial.
An opportunity for the EU to stop its bureaucracy and cleanup its act. If it cannot convince anyone that they are next, then one can argue that democracy is completely finished.
If this nonsense continues it will be the UAE + Saudi Arabia + China, cutting off the west and that's that.
This is one of the clear examples that Trump is seeing Putin's Russia as a model for his vision for the USA.
Judiciary: appointments and ideological alignment with some of the Supreme Court. Thomas and Alito are fully controlled, Kavanaugh just loves a powerful executive, the rest aren't controlled but often in agreement.
Then there's his use of executive power to punish his adversaries, e.g. Perkins Coie.
He's not directly controlling the judiciary yet, but he has appointed wildly extremist judges and threatened judges who rule against him with impeachment, so he's certainly making an effort.
They really didn't. It was a dog and pony show under the belief that he would not make his way back into power. The dems/reps did not want to set a precedent of holding a president to account for doing terribly illegal things. They didn't intend to actually do anything to prevent this.
And so here we are.
That tariffs have been so absolutely scattershot, says Trump actually is the one calling the shots there.
(If you doubt this, go watch some clips and compare how he talks now to how he talked during his first administration. If you were concerned about Biden's state in 2024, you should be concerned about Trump now.)
The biggest question for me now is how the usual defenders of this lawless administration will try to defend this or both sides it.
This just needs to happen every across all government, it’s like brushing your teeth to kick out the bacteria, but each individual institution needs a different kind of “floss” depending on the nature of the ways they have strayed from their original purposes.
Equally the same for data that goes into the algorithm - if you can control that you control interest rates.
Can’t believe you are saying that!! Then anyone can manipulate it like they manipulate stocks by writing hit pieces one day and gushing articles a few days after,
When it crashes (and it's not clear when that will be), it will crash back to a cash-value baseline. And, sigh, it's not clear where that is. But it won't magically start going back up. The cyclic reinvestment engine needs to be reinvented every time.
For many of the smaller players I think there's unfortunately a lot of people who realized there's significant money to be made in grifting. Many of the largest crypto proponents have pivoted into endeavors, whether crypto or otherwise, that profit off of being rewarded for being part of the 'correct' tribe.
The Democrats should play hardball but the geriatrics can barely take a swing.
The tech titans like Thiel see the Trump administration as a "big bet" a startup investment. They can "shoot for the moon" and try to realize the network state. If they fail, they figure they'll just toss the Democrats some campaign contributions and all will be good.
Powell corrects him in real-time. Worth watching given today's statement.
2025-10-03
"You Decide: What Does the Fed’s Rate Cut Mean?”: <https://cals.ncsu.edu/news/you-decide-what-does-the-feds-rat...>
2025-12-10
“A divided Federal Reserve cuts interest rates for a 3rd straight time”: <https://alaskapublic.org/news/national/2025-12-10/a-divided-...>
"‘Silent Dissents’ Reveal Growing Fed Resistance to Powell’s Cuts”: <https://archive.is/JDlB0#selection-1235.0-1235.64>
2025-12-30
"Fed Minutes Reveal Split on Interest Rates Headed Into 2026”: <https://money.usnews.com/money/personal-finance/articles/fed...>
"Deep Divide Inside Fed Raises Questions About Timing of Further Rate Cuts”: <https://archive.is/7XdPo>
"Trump says he will 'probably' sue Fed's Powell”: <https://www.aa.com.tr/en/americas/trump-says-he-will-probabl...>
HTH
I can see why someone would have a issues with "a bunch of rich bankers appointed by politicians" controlling American monetary policy. But I can't really see a better way at least, until we can achieve a post-scarcity economy or something.
Yellen had a long academic career before going into public service (with various roles at the Fed before becoming Fed chair):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janet_Yellen
Bernanke had a strictly academic career before going into public service (and was/is probably one of the foremost experts on the Great Depression, something that was handy in 2008/9):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Bernanke#Academic_and_gove...
Greenspan was in the finance world pre-Fed. Volcker was in government for his entire career pre-Fed:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Volcker#Career
I think people over-estimate how many "rich bankers" are in the Fed, especially at the FOMC.
Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast with some Fed members in recent years, especially the more obscure regional ones, about their work, and how they often go out and talk to local businesses about what's happening 'on the ground'.
The investor class has capital, and America is capitalist. I’m not the biggest fan either but we gotta acknowledge the reality we live in.
The dual mandate says nothing about asset prices. The only prices it mentions are those involved in CPI calcs.
The Federal Reserve was not created “just because”. The US banking system was wildly unstable when run… largely as the libertarian view would have it.
The long term policy goal (stability in the path of nominal incomes (prices + real activity) in the very short run, and prices in the medium-to-long run) would be unaffected, but the whole operational aspect would be simplified quite a bit.
I don't know about "inherently unstable system", given that as central bank independence has grown so has, generally speaking, monetary stability:
First, one must understand that the Federal Reserve was the main trojan horse vehicle for the European banking families into America. Read any number of good books, starting with the latest edition of G. Edward Griffins "The Creature from Jekyll Island".
But all that is mostly known already to those who have payed attention and done the reading... so whats next?
My conclusion is that America is being setup, in multiple ways (fall guy for global empire, etc), but one major setup that is going on right now is a twofer: 1) Jack up the US economy at any time by raising rates and unraveling the ponzi scheme and 2) If you do 1), you have the perfect excuse to try to implement some CBDC-esque new system, but this time with much more surveillance tech, for example unified ledgers that merge digital identity with financial identity, with ESG and social credit style added on. Read Whitney Webb for more on the structures being put in place for this.
So what is happening is that Trump knows the people that control the Fed, for whom the Fed chair is a mere mouthpiece, really want to suddenly and unexpectedly hike rates and soon, but Trump doesn't want it to happen under his last term, so he has been doing major backroom maneuvering to influence the Fed every time a rate-change date is coming up. Essentially he wants to kick the can to the next POTUS, but since the Fed is technically independent, it really can do whatever it wants, all he can do is fire after the fact. My guess is they will drop it on him late term, a perfect excuse to usher in the political pendulum swing of the hegelian game they play with us.
To me, that this backroom maneuvering is becoming more public tells me they really want to do the sudden rate hike.
Want a decent intro to the real fed? Try this video from the great James Corbett: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IJeemTQ7Vk
Of course I would strongly prefer to not be a presidential system at all. But if we're discussing post-Trump constitutional reforms that could plausibly pass, I think removing the Attorney General/DOJ from the president's purview and also placing some checks on the pardon power seem doable
Having grown up in the US and having blinders on, I always thought all those parliamentary systems seemed unstable and sometimes comical. But now I see the value in it. Once a leader has demonstrated he is not up to the task, has grown out-of-touch, or has descended into madness, he can be replaced by his party, and if that didn't happen, a no-confidence vote could trigger an election. No guarantee either of those things would happen, but the option exists. The fixed four-year term idea now seems artificial and inflexible.
I suspect the current US leader and maybe even the previous US leader (maybe in his 4th year) would have suddenly found himself a back-bencher.
or is that the obvious move so it'd be inverse?
There are countless comments and discussions on this board about how:
1) interest rates should be zero,
2) interest rates being non-zero create a misallocation of capital where there is a return on an investment without any ingenuity or creation behind
3) Banks are too risk averse to lending and their risk averse behavior is due to the risk free rate they enjoy when they park money at the Fed and when they buy T-bills
No matter how little ingenuity or creation is required to keep afloat a zombie company or a dubious startup, for sure it's a notch higher than what happens when that money is parked at the Fed or invested in t-bills...
The Fed absolutely crushed it. Totally unambiguous.
(a) >We live in a world where the powerful deceive us. We know they lie. They know we know they lie. They don't care. We say we care but do nothing.
That belief isn't the consequence of the situation, but the cause. There is ample ability to change events, but people must believe they can act and act together, as they have for centuries of democracy and for all human history. They do it in Iran. The Republicans and MAGA movement have made changes that would have been unbelievable ten years ago.
There are a lot of reasons for that, of course, but the bottom line is that when things get bad enough -- much worse than they are today -- then more people will take to the street, along with whatever sacrifice that entails. We're just not there yet, because for many, there is far too much to lose.
because a lot of people have a kind of built-in main character syndrome and believe they're the protagonists of the world and things can't really go bad. They haven't internalized that there isn't some god behind the curtain that saves them. Same reason a lot of people ignore health issues.
That's how it goes in every country that ends up in the dirt, they all thought they were special, they all thought "surely we're not there yet" and you can pick their remains out of the rubble.
That’s true even if the next administration is Republican (Vance or whoever), but especially true if the next administration ends up being Democratic instead-which while not certain, has decent odds-the more Trump defies norms, the more voters who will wish to go back to a “normal” Presidency
It’s very clear now that we need a lot more regulation of what presidents can and cannot do. Not to mention judicial reform. But if you’re a democrat theoretically getting power in 2028 you’re going to have immense pressure to move forwards, focus on kitchen table issues, yadda yadda.
Some things, it just doesn't matter what the next administration does. The people of the US may, at any time, elect an administration that continues the course of breaking norms. The fact is that businesses, industries, banks, and nations have to guard against that possibility more than they need to cooperate with the next administration.
I think it's a bit fanciful to think you can take all the policies back to normal and have, Europe for instance, say "Oh good! Everything's back to normal!" I could be wrong, but I think that ship has sailed. Europe will work towards a new normal that looks to their own interests. And no action the next administration can take will change Europe's determination in this regard.
I think this will be as true of actors in the financial and industrial spheres as it will be of Europe in the security sphere.
A reminder that this is the second time that Trump has been elected.
(People were saying what you're now saying after he was kicked out—an event that he says was rigged—the first time.)
It's quite impressive how scared everybody is of this administration. News outlets, international leaders even in face of threats, big tech, including the delusional Musk who thought he could've handled the president's rage.
Hell even his own party is scared of speaking up, you either fall in line or you risk falling victim of the most vicious direct attacks, even if you've been a huge and core voice for the president, see senator Marjorie Green.
From Russia, to Belarus, from the Philippines to Argentina, from Hungary to Poland it's crystal clear what a failure of democracy it is to have a presidential republic.
Granted, the Fed is not funded by taxpayer money, but it's entirely circular since it loans money to banks, and the government has to routinely bail out the same banks.
The interest rate can be set via a comprehensible algorithm learned over historical data, a job for a mid-level data scientist or increasingly just for an AI. As for bank regulation, let the bad banks fail and die. The stock market will manage just fine without their manipulation.
Those downvoting me favor obscurity over transparency, and don't really have a counterargument.
> The interest rate can be set via an algorithm.
Who writes this algorithm? Are algorithms without biases?
> The algorithm is to be tuned over historical data
So you’re saying that historical data can’t have biases? Data cannot be collected and shared (or not collected a la jobs report) to manipulate the output? Seems a bit of a naïve take if you ask me.
How on earth do you think the Fed sets the rate? Each board member probably has a simple spreadsheet, although they use their gut feeling in the end. It's markedly less objective and completely un-transparent.
People here are funny in that when I preach for transparency and objectivity, they preach for obscurity and individual board member bias.
> although they use their gut feeling in the end.
That gut feeling check is pretty crucial, I think. Why not just work to make the Fed a more transparent org? And let’s say it is by an algorithm - will it be open sourced so it can be vetted?
Edit: also more crucially, who’s responsible when the algorithm fucks up?
Because as we all know, when it comes to financial markets, past performance guarantees future results. Oh wait . . .
In any event, the point of a decent algorithm is that if the result isn't complying with the action, upcoming updates to the weights will fix it. Moreover, changes to the weight would be such that they optimize for maximum learning.
It is so weird seeing people preach for an obscure entity to do something so basic, and being shut down when asking for transparency. Today's AIs could write good model-development algorithms for tasks that are a hundred times more complicated.
Oops, the unaccountable algorithm eased when it should have tightened and Volcker Shocked when it should have eased. No prob, the weights will get tweaked and all will be well. Once the economic crisis blows over, anyway . . .
Is that really your response to “past results aren’t indicative of future performance”? Honestly at that point why not just let ChatGPT run loose and set guidance? Please, I implore you to think about the issue a bit deeper.
MAGA, of course, tried to accuse Biden of weaponizing them during his term so that they could justify the Trump 2.0 revenge tour. Now we're here.
A true free market isn’t at whims of any one person.
Powell normally talks around the political pressure he's been subjected to. Funny to see him call it out right here.
> Some countries that have prosecuted or threatened to prosecute central bankers for the purpose of political intimidation or punishment for monetary policy decisions: Argentina, Russia, Turkey, Venezuela and Zimbabwe.
* https://xcancel.com/jasonfurman/status/2010532384924442645#m
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Furman
And Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC)
> If there were any remaining doubt whether advisers within the Trump Administration are actively pushing to end the independence of the Federal Reserve, there should now be none. It is now the independence and credibility of the Department of Justice that are in question.
> I will oppose the confirmation of any nominee for the Fed—including the upcoming Fed Chair vacancy—until this legal matter is fully resolved.
* https://xcancel.com/SenThomTillis/status/2010514786467959269
who sits on the United States Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs (which oversees the Fed):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_Committee...
Sure the Fed isn’t perfect. But we don’t really have a better solution as of now because our financial systems are extremely powerful and anyone in office would love to abuse it if they can.
Sure, the renovations are ridiculous. But it’s not like this administration is austere in the slightest, so that’s a bit rich. Not to mention the cronyism prevalent across the cabinet.
Latest 2024 budget expenses, a fairly good percentage were chocked with no ID, no supervisor or delgated authority.
Better now, no ID, no money from Treasury.
It seems like theres a bit of an inflection point right now in the US. I wonder how much entropy the system can handle it has to be near a breaking point.
Is the argument that if you’re the Federal Reserve Chair you should be immune to any criminal investigation?
Or only when you have a history of disagreement with the administration?
That’s seems like a dangerous precedent to set
No one is above the law, right? He’ll be found innocent if nothing wrong was done
jmclnx•1h ago
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/12/fed-jerome-powell-criminal-p...
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/federal-reserve-chair-powe...
zamadatix•1h ago
dang•7m ago