What happens to central banks under pressure?

President Donald Trump has been pressuring the Federal Reserve from a few angles. So we wanted to look at other examples of political pressure on central banks, to see what it might mean for us and for the economy. 

Enter the watchers. The people who’ve had their eyes trained on central banks all over the world, for years, notebooks out, scribbling down their observations. They’ve been trying to gauge just how independent of political pressure central banks actually are – and what happens when a central bank loses that independence. 

Today on the show, we sidle up next to three of the leading central bank watchers, to watch what they’re watching.

Further reading:
- Carolina Garriga’s: Revisiting Central Bank Independence in the World: An Extended Dataset
- Lev Menand’s: A New Measure of Central Bank Independence
- Carola Binder’s: Political Pressure on Central Banks

Further listening:
- Lisa Cook and the fight for the Fed
- A primer on the Federal Reserve's independence
- The case for Fed independence in the Nixon tapes
- A Locked Door, A Secret Meeting And The Birth Of The Fed

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This episode was produced by Willa Rubin with help from Sam Yellowhorse Kesler. It was edited by Marianne McCune and fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. Engineering by Robert Rodriguez and Maggie Luthar. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money’s executive producer.

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