Miran Confirmed, Cook Stays: Why the Fed’s Political Theater Shows Markets Should Set Rates

Originally published on Substack. 

The Federal Reserve isn’t just in the headlines for interest-rate policy this week. It’s in the headlines for raw politics.

On Tuesday, the Senate narrowly confirmed Stephen Miran, who will remain on the White House’s Council of Economic Advisors, to the Fed’s Board of Governors in a razor-thin 48–47 vote. The confirmation fills the seat vacated by Adriana Kugler, who resigned effective August 8. Miran will serve out the remainder of her term, which ends in January 2026, making him a short-term but potentially influential voice at the table.

At the same time, a D.C. appeals court upheld a lower-court ruling blocking President Trump from removing Governor Lisa Cook, who holds statutory protection against dismissal except “for cause.” This means Cook remains a voting member of the Federal Open Market Committee, which is already preparing to announce its latest decision on the target interest rate.

Two fights, two outcomes—but both tell the same story: the Fed is drowning in politics.

Why This Matters

The FOMC is made up of the seven governors in Washington and five of the twelve Reserve Bank presidents on rotation. That means twelve people decide the price of money for a nation of 330 million. If it’s “bad” for twelve officials to dictate the cost of borrowing and lending, it’s even worse to obsess over the swing vote of one official.

And yet here we are—Miran’s confirmation sends ripples through markets because traders think his presence as a Trump surrogate could tilt the committee toward more aggressive rate cuts. Cook’s survival keeps alive another vote perceived as dovish. The message? It’s not fundamentals setting expectations—it’s personnel drama. That should bother everyone.

The Case for Markets Over Committees

1. Price controls don’t work. We’d never tolerate a government committee deciding the price of beef, cars, or Bitcoin. Why do we accept twelve officials setting the most important price in capitalism—the interest rate? Prices are signals. They convey information about scarcity, preferences, and risk. Suppress them, and you suppress the information markets need to function.
2. Personnel fights reveal the flaw. Whether Miran, Cook, or anyone else fills the seats, the fact remains: presidents appoint, the Senate confirms, and now courts even referee whether members can be fired. That’s politics. It’s not about neutral technocrats parsing data—it’s about partisans maneuvering for control of a lever that moves trillions.
3. Rules beat discretion, and markets beat rules. Some reformers argue for stricter policy rules like the Taylor Rule or Nominal GDP Targeting, and those would be steps away from today’s “seat-of-the-pants” discretion. But the real solution is to shrink the Fed’s balance sheet and let market interest rates emerge from competition among lenders and borrowers. The Hayekian lesson is clear: dispersed knowledge and millions of decisions beat centralized guesses from Washington.

A Better Roadmap

• Narrow the mandate. Today the Fed claims a dual mandate—price stability and maximum employment—but the Fed’s own longer-run goals read like a politician’s platform. Strip it down to protecting the currency’s value, and stop trying to engineer macroeconomic outcomes.
• End credit allocation. During crises, the Fed hands out targeted loans to chosen sectors. That’s fiscal policy in disguise and opens the door for political pressure. Let markets, not central bankers, decide who gets capital.
• Let interest rates clear. The Fed’s job while it exists should be a lender of last resort—not deciding what a 30-year mortgage “should” cost. If inflation is a hidden tax, manipulated rates are hidden subsidies, benefiting today’s borrowers at the expense of tomorrow’s.
• Transparency over theatrics. Stop turning every FOMC meeting into a global guessing game. Publish a simple operating framework, stick to it, and let the market price risk. Right now, traders are pricing personalities instead of fundamentals.

The Bottom Line

Miran’s confirmation and Cook’s court-protected tenure don’t “save” or “doom” the economy. They just highlight the absurdity of centralizing control of money in Washington. If twelve people shouldn’t set interest rates, then neither should one. Not the Fed Chair. Not the President. Not a judge.

The solution isn’t finding the “right” central banker. It’s admitting that no central banker has the knowledge or incentive to do what millions of borrowers, lenders, and investors already do every day—discover prices through voluntary exchange.

That’s why the Fed, and the president, should step back unless it is to get government out of the way. Markets know better!

Let People Prosper.