(PARTIAL-)CROSSPOST: PETER CONTI-BROWN: Trump Continues His War Against Fed Independence
Piece behind Peter's pay wall; his subheadline: "After a brief reprieve, Trump is back with his pretextual war against Lisa Cook, which is in fact a war against the Federal Reserve"...
Peter Conti-Brown put this behind his paywall, which I think is the wrong judgment for him to make here, given how important it is. So I am going to pull some key paragraphs out. And I hope he will reconsider, and put the whole thing out from behind his paywall.
Of all the Governors, or the people who are likely to be confirmed by the Senate as overnors of the Federal Reserve, Lisa Cook is a (slight) outlier. She is the one who is most likely to think that the appropriate interest rate path for the economy involves lower interest rates. Her views of the long- and short-run costs of high unemployment and of the resilience of the American market system and the anchoring of inflation expectations are reasonable and reasoned, and not at all unusual for an economist. But they are are a step or two away from the core mass of the opinion cloud of central bankers, in a way that other governors’ views are not. This is the case even though she is the only Governor to have lived through a hyperinflation, and hence feels the costs of losing control of expectations (and the costs of fiscal dominance!) in her bones.
So why does Trump want to fire her, given that his successfully doing so weakens the strength of voices arguing for a slightly lower path for interest rates than the Federal Reserve typically adopts. We know why: (a) She is Black. (b) She is independent minded.
Are there any reasons for his actions that, even though they are entirely pretextual, would make her early resignation or removal from her seat as a Governor in any way appropriate? As far as I can see—no:
(PARTIAL-)CROSSPOST: PETER CONTI-BROWN: Trump Continues His War Against Fed Independence
<https://petercontibrown.substack.com/p/trump-continues-his-war-against-fed> <https://petercontibrown.substack.com>
After a brief reprieve, Trump is back with his pretextual war against Lisa Cook, which is in fact a war against the Federal Reserve
Peter Conti-Brown
Aug 07, 2026
Donald Trump today signaled that he would accept the Supreme Court’s invitation to try, again, to become the first President in US history to fire a sitting Fed chair.
This effort, like his previous effort, will likely fail, but it’s a close call. The Fed — and with it, its hard-fought victory over inflation and economic stability more generally - are once again in peril….
The Law of Fed Independence After Trump v. Cook: Last June, the Supreme Court handed Lisa Cook a narrow legal victory… [but] “the ultimate question of whether the President can remove Cook for cause will depend in part on the underlying facts,” it said, inviting a more developed procedure for such removal than the Trump Administration followed in its first effort last summer. The Trump Administration has now accepted that invitation… giving her 21 days to respond to the allegations — since, in my view, debunked — that she committed mortgage fraud…. The problem with the Administration’s position is… [that while] the Court did make a lot out of that lack of process… that’s not the only part…. The Court wrote… “the appearance of independence is key.”… The President’s approach here is that it is fully pretextual…. Courts are likely to see through this ruse….
What the Senate should do: It’s time for Thom Tillis to make another statement. No Republican Senator who wants to be taken seriously as an inflation fighter should sit idly by…. Senators should state… that no candidate for the Fed’s Board of Governors will receive… even a hearing….
What Democrats should do: Make Fed independence a political issue. The Fed isn’t exactly the world’s most popular entity, to be sure, but voters have very strong views on inflation….
What Kevin Warsh should do…. Reporting suggesting a direct line between Warsh and Trump means that Warsh knew about, or was even party to, this effort. I sincerely hope not (and have no reason to think that it does)….
Where does Lisa Cook go from here?: Cook’s legal defense has, to date, been extraordinarily expensive, covered by gifts of labor and money…. It’s about to get a lot more expensive. I also fear the appointment of Todd Blanche as Attorney General…. I fear that Blanche will skip the niceties… and simply try to indict Cook. It’s not an indictment that will stick. I don’t even know if he could get a grand jury to cooperate. But it has never been more costly, financially or personally, to be Lisa Cook. This is a fact that we shouldn’t forget as she, once again and mostly alone, seeks to protect Fed independence for the rest of us.
<https://petercontibrown.substack.com/p/trump-continues-his-war-against-fed> <https://petercontibrown.substack.com>
Brad DeLong here: What to note:
There has long been a campaign against Lisa Cook, starting with what I regard as highly dishonest attacks against her scholarship by Harold Uhlig and company, and in Harold’s case I am highly confident he did not actually read the paper <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/have-harald-uhlig-and-company-read>. We did read the paper. And then we grilled her in person for two hours and more, largely about data construction. And we came away satisfied.
The disqualification playbook has now been run against Cook three times — her scholarship (2022) and her office (2025, 2025) — but always pretextual.
Getting Lisa Cook off the Federal Reserve Board would reduce the voices enunciating strong reasons for a relatively low interest-rate path, and so push its state of mind not toward but away from Trump’s preferences.
John Roberts’s decision letting Cook keep her job for now reached the right result through dishonest reasoning: a lot of lies, using a “quasi-private” historical story that is factually backwards.
The repeal of Humphrey’s Executor is the most destructive blow to the American governmenal order in history, creating an aggrandizement of the executive via creative delegations that were explicitly not to the president in his normal executive capacity.
Cook now faces a fresh 21-day removal process over debunked mortgage-fraud allegations, ruinous legal bills, and the risk that AG Todd Blanche tries to indict her outright.
Peter Conti-Brown closes his piece stating that it has “never been more costly, financially or personally, to be Lisa Cook”. Financially, yes, but personally? Actually, I think not:
It is true that when she wakes up in the morning she now has to deal with an awful lot of people dissing her in small and large ways.
It is also true that she needs security. There are a lot of sickos out there, and Trump is not averse to making people aware that he can point those sickos at you and put you at some physical risk.
But the dissing, the scorning, the lying, the discrimination, the physical risk— These are in this day only an extremely slight shadow of the lives that her African American ancestors lived from the moment the slavers reached their villages in Africa and ever since.
And there is one more point: In Buddhist legend, the Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara turns aside from Nirvana and Enlightenment. Why? Because there are souls yet unredeemed. The are still trapped in the cycle of samsara and subject to suffering in this life and in Diyu, the hell of the ded ruled by Lord Yama. So she incarnates herself as the Princess Miaoshan. She lives and dies. She then descends into Diyu, so enduring the torments of the damned, when she could be in Nirvana among the Enlightened. In Diyu, she begins the work of relieving the suffering of the damned and bringing them to Enlightenment. And at that moment, as she steps into one of the flame pits of hell “there arose a beautiful large lotus-flower, up and up, from the bottom of the depth of the fiery pit, to receive her feet”. For her, Nirvana was not chanting sutras with the other Enlightened amidst the pools with the lotus flowers. For her, Nirvana was doing her job of harrowing hell.’
Overstated as an analogy for Lisa Cook’s position? Yes. It is difficult, personally, to be Lisa Cook right now. But is it costly in any true sense? I think not. I think doing the job, when the job is very much worth doing and very important, is not personally costly, but rather personally extremely remunerative. Truly, she has an opportunity to excel. And she is doing so.
What to note, at much greater length: below the paywall because I do not have time to turn sixteen long points into a coherent essay, am embarrassed t give world access to what are largely stream-of-consciousness notes, and yet I am still holding the line at not asking LLMs to summarize my own notes for me, and print it:
