What's at stake if the Federal Reserve loses its independence?

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Speaker 1 Nine months, three weeks, and six days to go.

Speaker 1 I will explain. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace.

Speaker 1 In Los Angeles, I'm Kai Risdoff. Tuesday, today, 22 July.
Good as always to have you along, everybody.

Speaker 1 There are 297 days remaining in Jay Powell's term as Fed chair, which means there are 297 days left for President Trump to insult, berate, castigate, or otherwise let his displeasure with the guy he himself appointed to run the central bank be known.

Speaker 1 That, as regular listeners to this program will know, is ground well trod, so we are not going to go there.

Speaker 1 What we are going to do with Greg Ipp from the Wall Street Journal is talk about what the President's behavior implies, that the Federal Reserve should be, if not actually under the President's thumb, then certainly thumb adjacent, and what that might mean, not just here, but for the rest of the global economy.

Speaker 1 Hey, Greg.

Speaker 2 Hi, Kai. It's good to have good to be here.

Speaker 1 And it's good to have you here. So, look, we are talking to you, number one, because you're a very smart guy on this, but also because you wrote on Fed independence the other day.

Speaker 1 And I'm going to start this with how you started that analysis, which is that for everything that has happened in the last five-ish years in this economy, right?

Speaker 1 The pandemic, supplies, supply chain, tariffs, the president, all of the Michigan,

Speaker 1 inflation expectations

Speaker 1 are

Speaker 1 pretty solidly anchored. And I want to know why.

Speaker 2 I think it's because for decades we've had in this country a central bank that is very focused on always bringing inflation back to 2%.

Speaker 2 And it can do that because it's independent. Presidents, at least since Clinton, have not interfered with the Fed's ability or willingness to do that job.

Speaker 2 And investors and the public have internalized that assumption. They don't even have to think about it any longer.

Speaker 2 So even at the height of the pandemic inflation, when prices and wages were going up a lot, people sort of understood that this was temporary, that once supply and demand returned to normal, so would price and wage behavior.

Speaker 2 And that is exactly what's happened. We got from there to here with inflation going from over 7% to between 2% and 3% without a recession because that trust in the Fed persisted.

Speaker 2 If the Fed wasn't independent, if the Fed was in a situation where instead of focusing solely on delivering full employment and low inflation, it had to worry about what the president wanted it to do, then people could not have that faith that, in fact, in a few years' time, inflation would always be what the Fed wants it to be.

Speaker 1 Aaron Powell, I wonder if there is in the President's

Speaker 1 remonstrations for lower interest rates, if there's a little bit of the dog catching the car. And what I mean by that is this.
The Federal Reserve really controls one interest rate.

Speaker 1 It's the short end of the curve, right? It's the federal funds rate. The market determines what the long end of the curve is going to be.

Speaker 1 And even if he gets a person in there who's going to lower the federal funds rate, the market is going to decide what the longer end, the 10-year, the 30-year are going to be.

Speaker 1 And that might be directly in opposition to what the president wants.

Speaker 2 Well, that's exactly right. The long investors get to decide what the 10-year bond rate is going to be, what the 30-year mortgage rate is going to be.

Speaker 2 Now, lots of things push those long-term rates around. And one of the things that pushes it around is what the Fed does.

Speaker 2 So if a new Fed chairman says, I'm going to lower rates faster than the other guy, maybe that would have some downward pressure on long-term interest rates.

Speaker 2 But then investors are going to say, well, wait a minute, why does this guy feel that interest rates need to be lower than the last guy? And is he taking his orders from the president?

Speaker 2 What does this mean for how much purchasing power my money retains after five to ten years?

Speaker 2 And you can imagine a scenario where short-term rates controlled by the Fed go down, but longer-term rates stay high or even go higher as investors adjust for the fact that they're going to have to endure a higher inflation rate eating away their purchasing power.

Speaker 1 Are you surprised that both equities and bond markets have been, generally speaking, minus the April 2nd or April 9th freak out?

Speaker 1 The markets have been generally sanguine this whole time, despite everything that's been going on.

Speaker 2 I am a little surprised, but I think I can also explain it to a certain extent.

Speaker 1 Go ahead, please.

Speaker 2 First of all, most investors and public commentators don't really think that Trump is going to go through with his threats and fire Powell. So that's not the main scenario they've discounted.

Speaker 2 Secondly, if he did do that, well, what would the next person do? That person would probably cut interest rates. But we also know that Powell was probably going to cut interest rates as well.

Speaker 2 He just wasn't going to do it as quickly or as much as Trump would want. So in some sense, you're in a situation where the likeliest direction of inflation interest rates was already down.

Speaker 2 And the final reason is that, well, you know, stock investors, they like low interest rates. But, you know, we've seen this movie before.
I like to put the question this way.

Speaker 2 If forcing the Fed to lower interest rates was such a great idea and good for everybody, why don't more governments do it?

Speaker 2 Because they've learned the hard way that when you take the independence away from the central bank and make its decisions subject to whatever the need of the day is, whether it's like goosing the job market or making it easier to finance the debt, you get inflation in the long run.

Speaker 2 And so most governments around the world, including the U.S. prior U.S.
presidents, have learned the hard way. It's better not to push the central bank around.

Speaker 1 Can we talk for a second about the next person? We've got a minute, minute and a half left to do this. There are a lot of guys, and they are all guys,

Speaker 1 auditioning, plainly auditioning to be appointed to run the central bank. And they are all over Fox News and conservative media.

Speaker 1 I mention that because appearances by the Fed chair himself or herself in Chair Yellen's day were relatively rare and they were big days on the economic calendar.

Speaker 1 I wonder what you think of the prospect of the next person in that job being on Fox News virtually every day.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 I haven't actually seen any of the candidates for the job say that that's what they plan to do. But I will agree with you, Kai, that this has been the most unusual

Speaker 2 Fed chairman I've seen, and I've seen quite a few.

Speaker 2 Typically, Typically, if you're in the running for this job, you try to be humble and you try to keep your views to yourself. You're not supposed to

Speaker 2 prejudice your next decision by announcing today what you want to do with interest rates. I mean, the actual date that you have the job is many months away.

Speaker 2 And you also care about the respect of your colleagues on the Federal Open Market Committee and of the markets. They want to see you as somebody who's an independent guy

Speaker 2 who makes up his mind based on the data. So having all these candidates out there saying, cut rates, cut rates, cut rates, everything Trump's doing is wonderful is a little unusual.

Speaker 2 Now, should we care about that?

Speaker 1 Quickly, Greg, if you would. Why should we care about that? Sure.

Speaker 2 If the Fed is still independent, I wouldn't worry so much about what they're saying now, because as soon as they've got the job, they can do what their judgment tells them they have to do and not worry about disappointing the president.

Speaker 2 But if the president has established a principle that he can fire the Fed chair whenever he wants, then that is when you really want to worry about what the presumption is of these people coming into the job.

Speaker 1 A very big if right there. Greg Hipp at the Wall Street Journal.
Thank you, Greg.

Speaker 2 Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1 Wall Street Today, once again, traders trading without a whole lot of conviction. Details, numbers, when we get there.

Speaker 1 As we were just talking about, Greg and I, the markets, both stock and bond, have largely shrugged off the chaos and uncertainty of President Trump's trade policy.

Speaker 1 Truth be told, traders haven't just shrugged it off. They've started actively reaching for some of the riskiest of investments, junk bonds.
Marketplace Kristen Schwab looks at why.

Speaker 3 Have you found yourself a little tired of tariff news, numb to the ever-shifting trade policy moves coming out of the White House?

Speaker 3 According to Brian Rayling, head of global fixed income strategy at the Wells Fargo Investment Institute, you are not alone.

Speaker 4 I think investors have become a little bit more immune to all of the noise.

Speaker 3 Even though the chaos is still chaosing, there hasn't been much evidence of economic fallout. Inflation has ticked up a bit, but is still fairly steady and low.
Unemployment is too.

Speaker 3 Company earnings have been okay.

Speaker 4 Markets were expecting things to be a lot worse.

Speaker 3 And so the markets have adjusted. Stocks have gone up.
Meanwhile, thanks to President Trump's embrace of digital currencies, the price of less traditional investments like crypto has gone up too.

Speaker 4 So if you want to continue making the bet, what else is left?

Speaker 3 Junk bonds, says Paolo Pasquariello, a finance professor at the University of Michigan. Junk bonds issued by small companies that are new or struggling.
High risk, potentially high reward.

Speaker 3 For Pascuar Yellow, the rush, the frenzy to buy them, can signal too much confidence in the market.

Speaker 4 That's, to me, further evidence that the stock and corporate bond markets are becoming frothy.

Speaker 3 Frothy, the part that comes before a bubble. Because big picture, confidence in the market is not always about confidence in the economy.
Many investors think short term, in months.

Speaker 3 Clifton Green is a finance professor at Emory University.

Speaker 4 I think a lot of these investors who are buying these bonds are not really expecting to hold them to maturity.

Speaker 4 So I don't really view these as a bet that these companies are going to be around for generations as much as I think they won't default.

Speaker 4 And if they do, I think I'll get a decent amount of my money back.

Speaker 3 He says if investors see higher inflation or a pullback in consumer spending, they'll likely start to ease off. I'm Kristen Schwab for Marketplace.

Speaker 1 The very mid-2025 macroeconomic phrase of the day today is tariff exposure, of which General Motors said this morning it's got about $1.1 billion worth.

Speaker 1 The country's biggest car company by sales said on its earnings call today it gave up a billion plus in profits in Q2 thanks to President Trump's trade policy.

Speaker 1 That was more than the company had been expecting, and the hit could total $4 to $5 billion this year all in.

Speaker 1 Again, because of tariffs. Now, to be clear, the overall whack that tariffs have taken out of the economy so far has been less than expected.
Yes.

Speaker 1 But with each and every earnings report, we're getting a better picture of how exposed U.S. companies are.
Marketplace Sabri Benishwar has that one. Jennifer Luna sells toys and books.

Speaker 1 She's the owner of the Curious Bear Toy and Bookshop. The last time we talked, back in May, tariffs had her stressed and scared.
Today?

Speaker 5 I would not call us thriving in any stretch of the imagination, but we're definitely finding a way through it, finding a way, at least for now.

Speaker 1 So far, she is coping with higher tariffs with help from her suppliers.

Speaker 5 They've been able to absorb some of it, and then they, of course, pass some on to us, and then we pass some of that on to the consumer, which is still a lose-lose for everybody involved, but it's at least a way to survive.

Speaker 1 This is where a lot of businesses are at right now. They are managing.

Speaker 6 I don't think that the impact has been as bad as initially anticipated.

Speaker 1 Randy Payne is president of Key Bank Capital Markets.

Speaker 6 What we're seeing is that companies are quite agile. They're able to navigate moving their supply chains, obviously passing on price.

Speaker 1 How well businesses are coping has a lot to do with the industry. The defense sector is very insulated.
Packaging and retail are very sensitive, according to Moody's.

Speaker 7 About 60% of U.S. retailers have high exposure.

Speaker 1 Christina Boney is a senior vice president at Moody's.

Speaker 7 She says, expect price increases to really show up in retail in the third quarter among the most exposed home-related goods, such as home improvement, furnishings, and soft goods, apparel and footwear.

Speaker 1 But even within that, some industries can cope better than others. Alex Strayton is an equity analyst with Morgan Stanley.

Speaker 8 It's more difficult for apparel retailers to weather any sort of higher tariff than it is for footwear brands.

Speaker 1 That's because price competition in clothing is ruthless, she says. It's hard to raise prices there, but consumers seem more tolerant of rising prices for shoes.

Speaker 1 Strayton says some strategies like stockpiling can only go so far.

Speaker 8 The inventory pull forward is what makes me most nervous because there's a short shelf life, and so it often comes with discounting and margin risk down the line.

Speaker 1 So far, companies have been sharing costs, running through stockpiles, raising prices, and that has worked. Whether that will keep working depends on what new tariffs appear.

Speaker 1 In New York, I'm Sabri Benishore for Marketplace. You want tariff exposure? Customs brokers got tariff exposure for you.

Speaker 1 Whether it was the tariff palooza of April 2nd, the 90-day pause a week later, then the delay of that pause to August the 1st, and today, Treasury Secretary Scott Besant floating the idea that the heaviest of import taxes on Chinese goods might, yes, might slide even farther.

Speaker 1 Customs brokers have been in a world of tariff exposure hurt the past three some odd months. So we have called Gretchen Blau.

Speaker 1 She's our customs broker at Logistics Plus in Erie, Pennsylvania, to hear how she is doing.

Speaker 9 Everything is very busy right now. We have a lot of questions from various customers and whatnot, trying to

Speaker 9 get an idea of if the tariffs are really starting August 1st, which we don't have any further information than anyone else does.

Speaker 9 One thing that we've really been working on is bonded warehousing because when things are uncertain,

Speaker 9 some people feel more secure if their inventory is on U.S. soil, at least, and they don't have to pay the tariffs on those goods until they're withdrawn from the bonded warehouse.

Speaker 9 So, actually, we've just been working on bonding one of our warehouses here in Erie. We're working on expanding the space in our bonded warehouse in Cleveland.

Speaker 9 It remains to be seen how much it will save money for importers, but I mean, that's one option that a lot of people are looking at, and we've been spending a lot of time on.

Speaker 9 The biggest challenge is just to make sure that everyone knows what they need to know. Every time you hear a breaking news update, it's like, what is it now?

Speaker 9 How is this going to affect us now?

Speaker 9 Sometimes it can be like a cringe factor because you hear something being floated out there that's not official yet and you just feel like, okay how many how many questions are

Speaker 9 we gonna have on that

Speaker 9 you know a social media post isn't a regulation you have to wait until it comes out in the federal register i mean we want to be able to help our clients plan for for you know what might be happening like the 232 tariffs on on copper as an example we keep you know, letting them know this could happen.

Speaker 9 But if there's no official word, then it's hard to nail down when do you actually do something? When do you take action on that?

Speaker 9 I don't know.

Speaker 9 I think it gives me greater joy in other aspects of my life just to unplug, you know, just reading a book, just to give my mind a rest, because some of the things you have to do to, you know, classify stuff right now, it's a little much when you have to do that kind of thing all day long.

Speaker 9 So yeah,

Speaker 9 kind of turning it off is a good thing.

Speaker 1 It is indeed turning it off, except for us. Gretchen Blau, Senior Customs Brokerage Manager at Logistics Plus Erie, Pennsylvania.

Speaker 4 Coming up, it knows a street is closed, and so it routes around it.

Speaker 1 It was almost inevitable that robo-taxis would beget robo-traffic, right?

Speaker 1 But first, let's do the numbers. Dow Industrials gained 179 today, 4 tenths percent, 44,502.
The NASDAQ gave back 81 points, about 4 tenths percent, 20,892.

Speaker 1 S ⁇ P 500

Speaker 1 points to the good, less than a tenth, 1%. Wrapped today at 6,309.

Speaker 1 Another rather record close after yesterday. Unrelated to tariffs, Hershey told retailers it's raising prices of its candy because of a surge in cocoa prices.

Speaker 1 If you are curious which of its products will see a price increase, well, you're going to have to wait. The company hasn't released the list yet.
Hershey's shares up 2.8% today.

Speaker 1 Chris and Schwab was talking about stocks being high right now. Investors putting their money into low-priced shares.
Some of those have become meme stocks. Today's, look up Kohl's.

Speaker 1 It's like GameStop all over again, man. It's crazy.
Bonds up yield on the 10 year Tino down 4.34%. You're listening to Marketplace.

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Speaker 1 This is Marketplace. I'm Kai Rizdahl.
Subway, the sandwich shop of Once Upon a Time, the $5 foot-long, if you can remember, 10 or so years ago.

Speaker 1 It is the biggest restaurant chain in the country, 19,000 locations, which I mentioned because the company's got a new CEO, Jonathan Fitzpatrick by name, late of Burger King, the first new blood since Subway was bought by a private equity firm last year.

Speaker 1 All of which I'm talking about because right at the the top of the list of things Fitzpatrick is going to have to do is turn around slumping sales and, oh, by the by, handle more than a few disgruntled franchisees.

Speaker 1 Because of those 19,000 locations, not a one of them is owned by Subway itself. Daniel Ackerman is on the franchise beat today.

Speaker 15 In the 1980s and 90s, Subway was growing fast, and owning one became something like an American dream, says Stephen Zagor at Columbia Business School.

Speaker 16 It became the every person's business. It was very obtainable.
It didn't cost a lot.

Speaker 15 Opening a subway costs just about one-fifth as much as opening a McDonald's. Zagor says Subway keeps it simple.

Speaker 16 It's making sandwiches. We're not sending someone to Mars.

Speaker 15 But Zagor says owning a subway got a little too popular.

Speaker 16 They kind of lost control of that expansion and they were accused of cannibalizing each other.

Speaker 15 Franchisees complained that new locations kept popping up nearby and sapping their business. Negative corporate news didn't help, says franchise consultant Joe Labava.

Speaker 17 Everything from the foot-long Subway, which someone measured and it wasn't a foot long, to the gentleman that was found out to be a sexual predator that was the spokesperson for Subway.

Speaker 15 Plus, Subway's emphasis on promos made life even harder for franchisees who operate on thin margins, says Robert Byrne of the restaurant consultancy Technomic.

Speaker 4 To discount on top of that, sometimes, you know, NetNet, you walk away selling a sandwich having made no money at all.

Speaker 15 Subway's new leadership has its work cut out, says Genevieve Prieto, who runs the consultancy franchise reality check.

Speaker 18 They're going to really have to listen to their franchisees. I mean, but you're talking decades of distrust at this point.

Speaker 15 And a turnaround won't be easy, says Alex Susskind at Cornell's College of Business.

Speaker 18 The competition in the space...

Speaker 1 is very different than it was when Subway was founded.

Speaker 15 With Jersey Mics, Jimmy Johns, and Firehouse Subs, Susskin says there are a lot more places for customers to grab a quick sandwich.

Speaker 15 In a statement, Subway said it's focused on sustainable growth and taking a data-driven approach to franchise profitability. It also said it may relocate or close some restaurants.

Speaker 15 I'm Daniel Ackerman for Marketplace.

Speaker 1 I saw a Waymo on my way into Marketplace World headquarters today. It's not like they're rare here in Los Angeles, but you do do a double take when you see a driverless car go by.

Speaker 1 Robo taxis like that are becoming common-ish in more cities from San Francisco to Phoenix to Austin, and they're fine, mostly.

Speaker 1 One not small challenge, though, is what happens when roads programmed into those little robo-taxi brains are closed for an emergency like a fire or a big crash.

Speaker 1 The companies themselves do get an alert, but getting that message to the cars can be clunky. At least one city is working on that, though, as Julia Picard reports.

Speaker 12 Seattle is trying to figure out how to get info about emergencies and emergency vehicles to autonomous vehicles quickly.

Speaker 12 Armand Shabazian is a policy advisor at the city's Department of Transportation.

Speaker 19 Cities like Seattle have as many as 800 emergency dispatches a day.

Speaker 12 Right now, when someone calls 911 in cities with robo-taxis like San Francisco and Phoenix, the dispatcher enters the type and location of the emergency and sends an email to robo-taxi companies.

Speaker 12 The companies are then supposed to make sure that cars steer clear.

Speaker 19 From there, it's a little bit of a black box because we're not sure if the AV companies are able to integrate that information.

Speaker 12 And sometimes robo-taxis do become obstacles. Take this emergency scene in San Francisco earlier this year, recorded by a bystander.

Speaker 12 A first responder is in the middle of the street directing traffic. The robo-taxi is stopped well into the intersection and is blocking three emergency vehicles.

Speaker 12 Eventually, two fire trucks and another responder manage to maneuver around the stopped car.

Speaker 12 This is exactly the kind of scenario that cities are trying to avoid.

Speaker 12 Seattle has now teamed up with the Open Mobility Foundation, a city-led open-source nonprofit that builds and governs digital tools and data standards for public spaces.

Speaker 12 The foundation helped create the data standard that is now used to manage shared bikes and scooters in many cities. It's called the Mobility Data Standard.

Speaker 19 We're constantly pushing data, receiving data.

Speaker 12 In Seattle, it's used to enforce the rules of the road for more than 40,000 of these so-called micro-mobility trips a day. And now the city wants to use the system for robo-taxis.

Speaker 4 Autonomous vehicle knows that it's trying to get from point A to point B.

Speaker 12 Andrew Glass Hastings is the executive director of the Open Mobility Foundation and oversees Seattle's pilot program.

Speaker 12 He says the idea is to connect this 911 emergency dispatch data directly with the robotaxis so they can avoid the scene entirely.

Speaker 4 It knows a street is closed and so it routes around it.

Speaker 12 Instead of potentially becoming a roadblock.

Speaker 4 Right now, cities, you know, they have limited tools on how they communicate what's happening on their roadway to services like autonomous vehicles.

Speaker 12 And if it works well with driverless taxis, it could also be a good system for alerting sidewalk robots and delivery pods.

Speaker 12 Two other robo-taxi companies, Waymo and Zooks, are advising the pilot, as well as Google Maps and a bunch of other cities.

Speaker 4 We didn't want a solution that was Seattle specific, but we wanted to explore an option that would work in cities around the country and potentially around the world.

Speaker 12 Cities around the U.S. are watching because a main sticking point to getting robo-taxis on their roads is making sure that they don't get in the way.
I'm Julia Picard for Marketplace.

Speaker 1 This final note on the way out today, with which I am in complete agreement, the ACC, that's the Atlantic Coast Conference in College Sports, said today it's going to start fining schools if spectators storm basketball courts or football fields after games.

Speaker 1 $50,000 for a first offense, $100,000 for a second, $200,000 each time thereafter. The SEC already does it.
It's a half a million there.

Speaker 1 Also, yes, you kids, get off my lawn.

Speaker 1 I don't know. Jordan Manji, Zonil Maharaj, Janet Wynne, Oga Oxman, Virginia K.
Smith, and Tony Wagner are the digital team, part of it anyway. Francesca Levy is the executive director of digital.

Speaker 1 And I'm Kai Risdall. We will see you tomorrow, everybody.

Speaker 1 This is APM.

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Speaker 13 This is the time to get a new Honda with clearance savings. Search your local Honda dealer today.

Speaker 14 Facebook 2025 Consumer Choice Awards from Kelly Bluebook. Visit kbb.com for more information.