Fed independence is coming under attack. What it means for markets.
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. President Donald Trump’s pressure campaign on the Federal Reserve, and on Fed Chair Jerome Powell in particular, will likely lead to higher inflation. That’s the implication of a new study into the impact of presidential pressure on the Fed.
Entitled “Fed-President Pressure Index," the study was conducted by Yosef Bonaparte, a finance professor at the University of Colorado at Denver’s Business School. Though he completed the study this past September, his findings have taken on greater urgency in the wake of the recent news about the Justice Department’s criminal investigation of Powell, stemming from Powell’s testimony last year about the renovation of the Fed’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. The White House has accused Powell of misleading Congress about the project.
The new study doesn’t focus on Trump’s pressure campaign in particular but on the impact of all pressure campaigns since 1980, whether occurring during Democratic or Republican presidencies. To quantify the magnitude of presidential pressure at any given time, Bonaparte counted the monthly number of articles in 10 major news sources that discussed tensions between the president and the Fed—an index he calls his Fed-President Pressure Index, or FPPI. This index has fluctuated widely, as you can see in the chart below, reflecting the large historical swings in the intensity of presidential pressure on the Fed.
The highest FPPI index over the past 45 years is more than 90 times higher than the lowest reading. Notable Fed pressure campaigns include ones in both Trump’s first and second terms, one during Joe Biden’s term, and two more during George W. Bush’s first and second terms.
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