Former congressman and presidential candidate Dr. Ron Paul, author of the book End the Fed, discusses attempts by President Trump and other presidents to gain greater control over the banking cartel. He writes at the Ron Paul Institute:

There is a long history of presidential attempts to influence monetary policy. President Richard Nixon, for example, pressured Fed Chairman Arthur Burns to lower rates. Nixon and Burns were even recorded joking about Fed independence.

Fed Chairman William Martin may not have liked Ike, but he caved to President Eisenhower’s demands that the Fed increase the money supply. President Bill Clinton persuaded Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan to support Clinton’s economic plans. The most extreme case of presidential pressure (at least until the Justice Department launched its criminal probe into Powell) was when President Lyndon Johnson shoved the Fed chairman against a wall because the Fed raised interest rates, causing trouble for Johnson’s Great Society at home and Vietnam War abroad. President Trump is thus not different from his predecessors; he is just more transparent.

Opponents of Federal Reserve “independence” have a point. Allowing a secretive central bank to control interest rates and the money supply is the reason the purchasing power of the dollar has vastly declined since 1971, when President Nixon severed the last link between the dollar and gold. Fed-produced fiat currency is also the cause of rising economic inequality and instability. The beneficiaries of this system are the politicians and the corporatist interests living off the welfare-warfare state. On the other hand, President Trump’s critics are correct that giving politicians power to set interest rates would be a recipe for disaster. Instead of arguing over who should control the money supply and set rates, President Trump and Congress should work to audit and end the Fed.

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