RANEY ARONSON-RATH: In recent weeks, we’ve seen some of the largest bank failures in US history, prompting the Federal Reserve to take emergency measures to try to shore up the system.

NEWS ARCHIVE: Federal Reserve Treasury and FDIC stepping in overnight, hoping to curb panic

PRESIDENT JOSEPH BIDEN: Americans can rest assured that our banking system is safe. Your deposits are safe.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: FRONTLINE’’s latest documentary, Age of Easy Money, investigates the power of the Fed… 

CHRISTOPHER LEONARD]: The financial system has been built around extremely low, ultralow interest rates for 10 years.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: …and its impact on the US economy. 

FEMALE SPEAKER: It’s like choosing between your rent and your food.

DION RABOUIN [film clip]: Jay Powell is not messing around.

SHEILA BAIR]: If we hadn’t been driving our economy for 14 years with easy money and then trying to really quickly undo that, no, we wouldn’t be having these problems now.

JAMES JACOBY: What should the Fed do?

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Correspondent James Jacoby joins me to talk about this reporting. I’m Raney Aronson-Rath, editor-in-chief and executive Producer of Frontline, and this is the Frontline Dispatch.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: James, welcome to the Dispatch.

JAMES JACOBY: Thanks so much, Raney.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: I wanted to start with what’s going on right now. It’s a tense, uncertain time for the economy. How would you sum up what is happening?

JAMES JACOBY: Well, right now we are seeing, um, what effectively is the tide going out on basically the past 14 years, we’ve had extremely easy money, which means really low interest rates and all sorts of things that the Federal Reserve has been doing to try to pump up the economy with, with created money. And we’ve all seen inflation rise over the past year and a half or so. And in order to combat that, they’ve had to raise interest rates. And this is essentially like gravity. I mean, it’s as, it’s, it’s elemental to our economy. And, um, and so they, as they’ve been doing that, we, we see the effects of the past 14 years of easy money coming to an end and all the risk taking and all sorts of other behavior that was calibrated to that world. And now we’re seeing these disruptions in the banking system, a few bank failures, and it’s all related to this. And we’re seeing now the Fed again have to step in to shore up our banking system because, uh, they think it’s vulnerable to a larger systemic risk.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Right. Okay. So on the Fed, can you just be very clear about what the Fed has done, um, in light of the bank collapse and the fallout?

JAMES JACOBY: Yeah, so the Fed basically has opened up what they call a lending window. Essentially they’re lending to banks that are in trouble or that need money. And so there’s a crunch right now, uh, at several banks that have made some poor decisions and been poorly managed. Um, and their depositors are looking for money. Their investors have lost confidence. So what the Fed essentially is doing along with other government agencies, is trying to, uh, create all these kind of, uh, facilities and, and, uh, you know, pla- places where essentially these banks can come to. for help and uh, they’re offering, you know, now hundreds of billions of dollars of help to banks that are in trouble and need to meet their needs.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: So, I mean, is this something that you looked at as it was happening? Somebody who’s been reporting on the Fed as a big surprise, or did you think, okay, this is ultimately what they’re gonna have to do?

JAMES JACOBY: I mean, it, this, I, it, it’s kind of a mixed. It’s both not surprising at all that when we’ve had one policy that is so fundamental to our economy for the past 14 years, and that policy changes dramatically in the course of a, a year or so, you’re going to see repercussions. And, um, as you well know, we didn’t know when those repercussions would start to show themselves, um, and when some of the fragility of, of this system would show. But, you know, just a few days before our film aired Silicon Valley Bank collapsed. And, uh, it was absolutely related to the, to the Fed’s actions of raising interest rates and also to the fact that Silicon Valley had made very poor decisions given what the Fed was doing. But, um, but no, we couldn’t have anticipated when or what, but we certainly anticipated that, that there’d be disruptions as a result of the Fed pulling back on this big experiment.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: So I know after S.V.B. failed that you had a chance to talk to former FDIC chair, Sheila Bair. Can you talk to me about what she told you and what was your biggest takeaway away?

JAMES JACOBY: Well, the biggest takeaway was that it was interesting and Sheila is, is a fascinating person and, and really has been the belly of the beast. I mean, she was the head of the, of the FDIC during the financial crisis in 2008. And, um, and so she saw up close what the problems in the system were, and she was one of the architects of the, the, the main legislation to come out of that, to try to reform the banking system, which she herself would say was very incomplete and remains so to this day. And so I think she would say that one, it was surprising to her. That the, the Fed and, and the President and the FDIC all came to the rescue of these particular banks that they’ve rescued. Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank, these were smaller banks. They’re, they’re, they’re big, but they’re not the biggest. Um, but they were designated as systemically risky. And that’s why they were able to open up these emergency measures to, to save them. And I think that surprised her. And she thinks that there’s certainly a moral hazard in the idea that, you know, the measures that they’ve taken have essentially shored up uninsured depositors. That means, you know, wealthy clients of this bank that had more than $250,000 in that bank. And in this country, we only have, you know, insured deposits up to $250,000. And so I think she thinks it opens up a whole new precedent that we’d be, you know, essentially backstopping, uninsured deposits in this country. So, you know, I, I think the thing that I wanted to get at in that interview, though, with, with Sheila is here she is, she knows so much. She’s had so much experience, you know, how concerned is she? And what was surprising to me about what she said is she’s like, I don’t know how concerned I should be. .

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Hmm.

JAMES JACOBY: And that to me is, is an, a red flag in that she’s saying, you know, our regulators aren’t being communicative enough. We really don’t know the extent of this problem. So she’s saying like, not time to panic here, but it’s certainly time to demand some serious answers of our, of our top regulators and our, and this administration about what they’re gonna do in case there’s more fallout.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: So, I mean, James, obviously we lived through the Friday S.V.B. crash together, um, and you couldn’t have predicted that. Um, but years ago when you started working on this, I think you already started to see the fissures, right? And, and the, you’re starting to ask questions about the Fed years ago. Can you tell me about why you feel it’s been so important for you to spend the last couple of years investigating the Fed, Fed policies, and also what the ramifications of them are?

JAMES JACOBY: Yeah. I think, um, you know, this is something that you and I did in, in concert, Raney, in terms of thinking about the Fed as the, you know, kind of the most important but least understood institution in America in a lot of ways, you know? We’ve had it, is it, it is in charge of the money supply. It is in charge of interest rates, which are essentially the main, um, you know, the main instrument for driving the economy And it’s, it’s an intimidating topic. It’s an intimidating institution because it, you know, it’s complicated and how are we gonna explain this and how are we gonna make it visual? And how are we gonna make a compelling story about this? But at the root here is a story of, of an experiment and a well-intended experiment. And that, that really grabbed me in terms of thinking, in the wake of the financial crisis when the Fed essentially had stepped in to save the banking system, save our entire economy from a, another Great Depression. This kind of heroic institution at that time then basically bears the, the load of, of, of a decade of trying to grow the economy and, um, and the unintended consequences of it. So I think, you know, it, it was just so compelling. And the fact is, is that not many, not many programs other than the FRONTLINE. Not many people other than us would want to tackle something like this because it is intimidating. It is, it is so complicated, but that seemed all the more reason to do it.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Yeah, I, I really wanna say that one of the biggest challenges that you and I talked a lot about is how do you make this into a documentary? One of the funniest moments in the film is when somebody, uh, looks literally surprised. Tell me about that moment,

JAMES JACOBY: Yeah, well, um, that was with, uh, uh, uh, I mean a Nobel Prize-winning economist no less uh, Joseph Stiglitz who, um, you know, we, we sat down for an interview. Um, he’s a very busy person. It took long time to schedule that interview, and he kind of wasn’t–  you know, he came in a little bit winging it cuz he knows his stuff and he sits down and he’s like, wait, what are we doing again here?

And I said, you know, I explained what the project was. And he says, wait…

JOSEPH STIGLITZ: So you’re doing a documentary on the Fed

 and monetary policy?

JAMES JACOBY: We are trying to.

JOSEPH STIGLITZ: OK [laughs].

JAMES JACOBY: Are we insane?

JOSEPH STIGLITZ: No, no, no. I think it’s a great idea.

JAMES JACOBY: OK.

JAMES JACOBY: But it was, it honestly, he was not alone in that reaction of saying, wow. You’re really tackling something difficult here, but clearly, I mean, what could kind of be more important? And um, and I think that what’s been interesting since it aired has been the reaction, you know, especially with, with people that are streaming it and watching it. That that, you know, actually a friend of mine told me the other day, it’s like sort of, you know, It puts together a lot of the pieces that we’re all observing, you know, in our lives and in our economy, and reading the paper of what’s kind of been going on for the past decade. And in some ways there’s been this kind of gravitational force at work, this invisible force, and people weren’t able to necessarily recognize it. But a lot of that does have to do with what the Fed was doing. When we look at things like wealth inequality, when we look at things like the, the, for a long time, the rising stock market and rising housing prices and all sorts of things, you know, at the, at the root of it, it’s not the only root, but at the, at the root of it is, is what the Fed has been doing. And uh, and so I think, you know, it was certainly a challenge worth taking on.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Can you just remind our listeners what is the primary role of the Fed? Just in, in sort of normal times?

JAMES JACOBY: Sure. So, I mean, the Fed was basically set up in, in the 20th century, early 20th century to basically be a lender of last resort. Our banking system was a mess in the US at that time, and we relied on one banker, JP Morgan, to basically save the banks in the midst of crises, and it made no sense for us to do that. Congress created the Federal Reserve Act and empowered the Fed to essentially manage the money supply and to, to create financial stability in this country. And so what the Fed does in normal times, its tool is interest rates, short-term interest rates. The, the, that’s the cost of borrowing money in our economy. And the cost that the banks borrow from the Fed and then the, and then we borrow from the banks. And so in normal times, it will raise in lower interest rates. Um, In order to either make borrowing cheaper or more expensive, speed up the economy and heat it up or slow it down or cool it down. And yet it also has this role of coming in, in the midst of a crisis to try to save things and to, uh, print money in order to, you know, make sure the banking system doesn’t collapse. And then an another mandate was an added to the Fed. Which is this mandate of full employment and the Fed is meant to try to engender and create the conditions for full employment in this country and getting unemployment way down. Um, and so it’s often called it’s dual mandate, which is price stability, which is making sure inflation stays in check and full employment. And those are the main things that it has to worry about in normal times.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH:  So you mentioned it already, but let’s go back to the Fed’s response to the Great Recession when, um, you know, arguably this is when Easy Money begins. Talk to me about that and talk about if you would, quantitative easing, which I am so proud of myself for now, knowing what that means, thanks to you.

JAMES JACOBY: Good deal. So, yeah. So. Again, you know, in normal times the Fed’s just basically fulfilling its mandate, but then in an extraordinary circumstances, when there’s a crisis, for instance, the Fed will, um, come in and save the system. And so in the 2008 crisis, it lowered interest rates to, to almost near zero. Um, you know, really, really low, making it extremely. You know, easy money, for instance, it’s really cheap to borrow money. Um, that wasn’t enough. And so what the Fed Board did at that point in time, which was led by Ben Bernanke, is there were these. Different experimental tools that had never been used in the United States before. Um, they’d been used in other places. But, um, this tool called quantitative easing, which, um, also is called credit easing. And there’s all sorts of really crazy jargon around this stuff. But essentially what that meant is that the Fed. Has the power to print money or to create money. And what it can do is it can create money and funnel it into the banks. And the, the mechanism through which it funnels it into the banks and the financial system is it buys up all sorts of things that the banks own they own. You know, they own all sorts of bonds, uh, like US government bonds and mortgage bonds and things like that. So they used the power of their printing press to funnel money into the banks by buying things that the banks owned and buying things that were out in the, in the marketplace.

And it was this extraordinary tool. I mean, it’s so powerful if you think about it. That they have the ability to, to create money out of thin air. And someone in the film describes it as alchemy, you know, who’d worked at the Fed at the time, and that was extraordinarily successful as a tool in stopping the crisis from worsening. The banks were shored up and we didn’t go into a a, we didn’t go off the cliff. Um, the, the problem was what kind of happened next, which is that this was meant to be an emergency measure. It was not meant to be the sort of status quo..

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Right. Okay. That was something I thought you and your co-producer Anya bourg did an excellent job of showing– more than a decade of action by the Fed. 

. 

[midroll]

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: So let’s talk about Covid. Covid happens. It was inconceivable, right? Talk to me about what the Fed does in that moment.

JAMES JACOBY: Yeah. I mean, COVID is such an interesting thing in, in that, you know, we all look back on the pandemic with, with our various prisms and you know, obviously there’s the health prism and there’s the politics that came out of Covid. But we really wanted to kind of look through an economic lens. And you know, what happened was there were all sorts of vulnerabilities in our financial system and our economy that essentially were exposed when the pandemic hit. Our, our financial system was under incredible strain, and even in the early days, way before any of the lockdowns or social distancing, the markets were going crazy and really just in a free fall. So the Fed comes in and did a lot more than it did even during the 2008, uh, financial crisis in terms of quantitative easing, lowering rates to zero, all sorts of extraordinary lending programs to banks and financial institutions and, and all sorts of unregulated, um, financial institutions. And, um, they even went to the lengths of, of, of saying that they would buy up corporate bonds and junk bonds and anything essentially to put a floor under the financial system so that we didn’t have another great depression and they used extraordinary amounts of fire power, uh, to do so. And, um, you know, and, and that was also in conjunction with what uh, the Trump administration and Congress were, were doing in terms of aid to, to Main Street. You know, the, the Cares Act at 2.2 trillion, extraordinary amount of money, extraordinary, extraordinary relief for Main Street. So we really, as a country, both with the, with the Fed and the federal government stepped into the the void that was created by Covid and the shutdowns, and we, you know, we took extraordinary measures. Um, the thing was, again, that was, that then continued after the economy was starting to heal itself from this, uh, sort of self-induced coma.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Right. That’s really something. I mean, that’s the moment in the film where you realize how all these different things that were happening sort of come together. Talk to me about crypto and, and what went on there and how does that intersect with, uh, both the Fed, but also this idea about easy money.

JAMES JACOBY: Yeah. So, um, so when the, when the Fed intervenes during, during the Covid crisis and, and, and throws everything it can to try to, you know, keep the system afloat, um, You know, there, there was this overall question of moral hazard because they did end up bailing out essentially, or helping out some of the riskiest players in the financial system. And they were, they, they felt justified and one could make a very good argument as to why they had to do that so as to avoid a bigger crisis. But still there is this idea that, you know, when you, when you basically bail out the big risk takers, then they’re gonna take more risks and. The Fed kept the money printer going, not just in the acute phase of the, of the pandemic, but continued on because they wanted to see us get back to empl, you know, good employment and they really wanted to run things hot. And so what happened was we got the strange disparity, um, between Main Street and Wall Street in, in the basically year plus after the pandemic first hit, which was that Main Street obviously was still suffering. We were all. You know, in our, our lockdowns and, and social distancing and businesses still shuttered and people still really suffering. Um, and yet Wall Street was doing extraordinarily well. I mean, really, record breaking time, and it was almost immediate and it was because the Fed had come in and rescued the markets. I mean, it literally did that. And so what happened was all this money. Flowing into the financial system, people were making money in the markets hand-over-fist. And so what happened outta that is that all sorts of speculation grows and, and, and fraud. Uh, when you have these kind of manias, and we did, we saw mania. And so you had the Game Stop thing where people were betting on these meme stocks and then we also, of course have seen crypto and, um, that was of great interest to us because it was sort of the, the epitome of the easy money age of here you have this thing, which is essentially, you know, uh, uh, you don’t want to get too deep into the debate about whether crypto’s real or not , but, but, but it was betting, it was speculative. It’s the most speculative asset and NFTs and all sorts of you know digital assets, and you saw this, you saw this take off and um, you know, you just rewind in your mind to a couple of years ago when you’re watching either the foot, you know, football season and the Super Bowl, or you couldn’t escape a crypto ad and you couldn’t escape a conversation with somebody about crypto. Well, this was all in part because the Fed was funneling money into the system. The markets were going up. All assets were going up. And so people felt rich and they wanted to bet and, and I’m talking about people felt rich who were like invested either a little bit in the markets and saw it going up or and invested in some crypto. So it all feeds on itself and it’s essentially a bubble.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: right. So the bubble bursts, which is, you know, you have that wonderful moment about multiple parts of, of, uh, the market, not just crypto. The film also shines a lane on the growing sector of the so-called shadow banks, like hedge funds, asset management companies. How do you and the experts you spoke to relate that to the easy money policies?

JAMES JACOBY: Yeah. So what happened? I mean, it’s kind of this odd confluence of things that happened. So, so we, we have our traditional banks that you and I have a bank that we go to and have our deposits there, and businesses have their, their money there too. But they, um, what, what had happened is that because after the crisis we did do some reform of the banking. um, you know, money moves where it into the shadows because it doesn’t, it likes to have no rules on it. And, and that’s kind of the story of finance in our financial, uh, world. And so what happened was we had this explosion of, of what’s called shadow banking, where essentially there’s all these financial institutions that are basically, lenders and trying to kind of, you know, turn into banks, but they’re unregulated. So some of the asset managers, the big ones, you know, multi-trillion dollar companies, some of the big hedge funds, some of the big insurance companies got into, um, all sorts of lending and borrowing that the traditional banks would do, but the traditional banks are now more regulated. So, um, you had the growth of this and, and also what happened at the same time with all the easy money is that all of this money was pouring in trying to look for places to invest and take risk. And so obviously the shadow banks were willing to take greater risks than some of the more traditional banks and do things that the traditional banks wouldn’t do. So, um, kind of perfect storm of things that a lot of people, including Jerome Powell, the head of the Fed, have been warning about for years and years. But there’s been very little action to regulate these, this huge swath of the financial system. And then, then the shadow banks had a, you know, basically had a terrible time as an understatement during the pandemic. Fed had to rescue a lot of them. Um, and rescue that system. And we now have, you know, an even larger shadow banking system that still really hasn’t been dealt with.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Hmm. Really, really interesting how those issues are intersecting. Okay. One of the best interviews in the film is with Neel Kashkari. He’s the president of Federal Reserve Bank in Minneapolis. you spoke to him before the recent bank failures and you asked him some really great questions. Talk to me about your conversations in this film, and just your take on Kashkari himself and, and what he’s told you.

JAMES JACOBY: Yeah. Yeah. Well, first of all, I, I, I really, um, I appreciate Neel Kashkari because he was the only sitting, current Fed official to speak with us, um, on camera. And I, I really applaud that because, you know, Anya and I reached out, um, you know, so many times to the Federal Reserve Board in DC— just essentially headquarters, and then a lot of the regional banks. There are 12 regional banks around the country and each of them has its own president. We, we forged conversations and relationships with a lot of different people and really tried to get as many current Fed Voices as possible. And it was astonishing, frankly, to us that, not that that that Neel Kashkari was the only one who agreed and he did so twice. And um, and so I really, I really thank him for doing that because you know, we needed to hear from the Fed and and I, you know, and I think it speaks to also strange, the strangeness of that institution. It can be very insular. It also is has to, everyone has to be very careful there about what they say because you know, one wrong word can move the markets. And I understand why they were reluctant to speak to a documentary team that was gonna be, you know, producing a long-term big project as opposed to just speaking about the news of the day. But again, Neel did it and, and it, it’s great. And he sat down with us two times and, um, and so, you know. What’s interesting about Neel Kashkari is that he had been a big proponent of, of the policies of the past 14 years, and believed strongly that these were good for, you know, um, Main Street America, that it was good. It, it helped to get unemployment down eventually. Um, it helped to, you know, maybe get economic growth get going, and he thought that the alternative, which would’ve been tighter, monetary policy was, was a bad alternative, and he didn’t mind the trade off, as he says numerous times in the film, that the rich got richer, that, that these policies did make the rich richer because he, as he said to me, that ignores the benefit to the poor. And so he’s a very staunch defender of the Fed’s policies and I was really glad that he, we have that voice in this film and people can decide for themselves what they, what they think of him. But I think do think that Neel is a, an honest broker and a true believer in what he was doing. But what’s interesting is that, once we started to see inflation rise and Neel went from what’s called a dove, which was, dove was in favor of easy money. Let’s run it really hot. Let’s, let’s do all we can to try to, as the Fed, to try to engender economic growth. Then when inflation hits, he switches to become a, an inflation hawk and says, We basically need to slam the brakes on the economy. You know, even if it incites a recession. Inflation is terrible. It’s, it’s a scourge for the entire, you know, populace. And he’s turned into somebody who, you know, admittedly has become very, very concerned about inflation. And so we now live in a world where, as we saw, um, you know, we see every couple of months or so the Fed meets. They decide what they’re gonna do next. Are they gonna raise interest rates? Are they gonna continue to fight inflation? Neel Kashkari has become someone who said, you know, no, I, I’m no longer in favor of easy money because we’ve got an inflation problem.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Okay. So speaking of the inflation problem, let’s talk about the Fed, starting to raise interest rates, um, last year and then they moved to the fastest pace that they’ve raised interest rates in decades. Can you just talk me through that decision and what are the major downstream effects of that?

JAMES JACOBY: Yeah. So you had the Fed and the federal government doing all of this help for an economy that was really suffering from the pandemic, but at the same time, that money’s going out there and it’s helping people. And, and, and economic demand is strong. But we also, as we all know cuz we lived through it, there were all sorts of supply, um, squeezes, you know, we couldn’t get this. There was a shortage of that. The supply chains from China were all broken and things like that. So you had all this demand chasing limited supplies of not only goods, but also services. A lot of people dropped out of the workforce during, during Covid for all sorts of reasons. Um, and so we got inflation. We got when you have too much demand chasing too few things, um, goods or services, you get price raises and then that feeds on itself in all sorts of ways. You know, you get corporations that then raise their prices because they can get greedy. All sorts of things can happen. And so what’s interesting is that the Fed first characterized this inflation as what they said was transitory, which really means, you know, it’s temporary. It’s just a bump. We don’t know exactly how long the bumps gonna be, but it’ll resolve itself. So we’re gonna continue doing what we’re doing, which is easy money. We’re not gonna pull back on any of these extraordinary things we’re doing because we think this inflation is transitory. Well, there were plenty of people who didn’t think it was transitory. I, I challenged Neel Kashkari on that, but he gives a good explanation as to why he thought it was. And then the Fed realized after a while that inflation was moving too rapidly. Um, and you know, that is their number one job to basically keep it in check and make sure our money supply is, is, and our, our make sure we have financial stability. And so they changed their tune and retired the word transitory. And then they’ve done, as you said, they’ve been doing these historic, um, rate hikes. And I, I, one could argue, and a number of people did that they were forced to really basically slam the brakes because they’d been slow to recognize the problem. And that has an effect. Um, and it’s still a question as to whether inflation is really in check. It’s, it’s still high. It’s way higher than they want it to be. It’s, it’s less than it was at its peak, but, um, it’s a real bind for the Fed now because part of the reason they’d run the economy so hot is because they wanted unemployment to come down. Well, the irony of all these rate hikes that they’re having to do because of inflation is that essentially, they’re trying to slow down the economy, which means slowing down hiring, and even according to their own projections, unemployment will rise as a result of these rate hikes and they’re in this terrible bind. They don’t want that. But that is part of the trade off of trying to get inflation under control. And we talk about all this with with Neel Kashkari, and we also talk about the fact that these rapid rate hikes have, you know, been jarring to the financial system and is is part of the reason why we’re seeing all the disruption today.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: The last thing we hear in the film, before the credits roll, spoken by economist Muhammad El Erian, is this is a political problem. I really felt like landing there was really important for us. And talk to me about that idea and that perspective, given all that you’ve reported on this topic.

JAMES JACOBY: So I’m, I’m really glad you asked that question because, um, as you know, that that was really a takeaway for us, um, for Anya me in reporting this story was that, that the idea that we’ve relied so heavily on the Federal Reserve, uh, to drive economic growth in this country for the past 14 years. And, um, and that’s in lieu of political action that, uh — that’s in lieu of our parties getting together to basically, you know, come up with investment plans for all sorts of things, for infrastructure, for the, the green transition to, um, you know, our, our schools and all sorts of things that we could be investing in. But, um, Congress has basically been dysfunctional and broken for a long time, and we’ve relied too heavily on the Fed and its easy money policies to grow the economy and that comes with major consequences and, and side effects as the film shows and, you know, um. One memorable thing that Stephen Pearlstein, a long term, um, a longtime columnist for the Washington Post said to Anya me at one point was, you know, the biggest threat to the American economy is, is our politics. And so we really wanted to kind of end on that note and refocus this on not just the Fed, but what our politicians and our elected officials could do to sort of ensure our economic future. And sort of as, as El-Erian says, basically create durable, inclusive, sustainable economic growth in this country. And that doesn’t come from just easy money alone.

RANEY ARONSON-RATH: James, thanks so much for joining me on the Dispatch.

JAMES JACOBY: Hey Raney. Thank you so much for having me.