Firing the entire Fed committee and replacing them with MAGA influencers might prove to be harder than Trump would like it to.
Donald Trump and US Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell (via Alamy/ KG1TAN) My sympathies to all of my Roman Catholic readers on the loss of Pope Francis. Having grown up in a Catholic country, the Pope was ever-present but, in the progressively godless 21st century UK, his striving to bridge the gap between the lives we lead and the platform on which he hoped we might place our moral compasses was a little lost. I am of course not a Catholic but a Jew and not a strictly practicing one to boot but that makes little difference when it comes to trying to do right by others. My father, though born in Germany, fought the evil of National Socialism for King and country and my Czech mother lost all but three members of her close family in the Holocaust. We were brought up under a constant beam of optimism that it'll all come good in the end if one is honest, works hard and tries not unnecessarily to hurt the next man. That was not a good basis for a financially successful career in the City where dog eats dog and where I observed that, if one goes swimming with sharks, one must be prepared to get bitten. I do wonder whether US Vice President JD Vance, one of the late Pope's last visitors, will have left the Vatican reviewing some of his own moral shibboleths or whether he sees having met the head of the church as providing a free-of-charge Papal indulgence. One way or the other, Washington's current direction of travel is becoming progressively less comprehensible, and the one which concerns me most, superannuated bond dog that I am, is the rising volume of President Trump's attacks on Fed Chairman Jerome Powell. There was a very good reason for placing the Fed Chairman beyond the reach of the Commander in Chief, for isolating the Federal Reserve from the political desires of the White House. Once again John Maynard Keynes, the master of the aphorism, to the fore: Keynes wrote to the War cabinet in 1945, "On such conditions, by cunning and kindness, we have…