The Fed Gets a Carve-Out, Jobs Come In Soft, and Workers Pivot to the Trades

The Supreme Court this week handed down a pair of rulings that effectively said: the president can fire the leaders of most independent agencies, but the Federal Reserve is special. "The Fed is special in the eyes of the Supreme Court," said Axios's Courtney Brown on Marketplace's Friday roundtable. Fed Governor Lisa Cook can keep her job for now, but the ruling came with a significant caveat—the Court said the Trump administration couldn't move forward because it hadn't used the right legal mechanisms to prove Cook could be fired for cause, but it didn't actually define what "for cause" means. The administration has signaled it plans to keep the pressure on Cook, and it's "not totally clear that they'll fail," Brown noted. Sudeep Ready of MS Now framed the carve-out in starker terms: "The Supreme Court has been just saying, 'Hey, we don't want to be the banana republic here.'" He pointed to the global precedent of what happens when a central bank loses its independence—hyperinflation—and said the Court seemed to recognize that "the damage that would be done" by letting a president wipe out the Fed's board on a whim.

A Jobs Number That Raises More Questions Than It Answers