Trump Asks Supreme Court to Let Him Crash the Economy

Until inflation gets down to two percent, and it’s at three percent and rising, cutting interest rates is very dangerous. The 1970s taught us this. If inflation is still rattling around in the bowels of our economy and you cut interest rates to try to spur growth, well, inflation is another word for growth! Inflation is not a bad thing; it’s just very much a Goldilocks-style dynamic where you don’t want it running too hot or too cold. If you run the economy hot, inflation will rise (and real growth, total growth minus inflation, could easily fall), and then you will have to raise interest rates later to try to tame inflation, crushing economic growth more. If you repeat this cycle…oh boy, that’s why normal non-finance people know who Paul Volcker is.

June 1980 serves as the all-time high on Lyndon B. Johnson advisor Arthur Okun’s misery index, which is simply just the unemployment rate plus the inflation rate, and the 1970s economy really was miserable. This swing back and forth between high inflation and low growth proved centuries of economic thought wrong, as what is known as stagflation was once thought to be an impossible set of economic dynamics. Low growth should lower inflation with it, but if inflation rises due to other dynamics–like the highest tariff rate since 1934–you’re stuck between a rock and a hard place monetary policy-wise, because cutting or raising interest rates will help one half of the dual mandate while harming the other. If the labor market weakens and unemployment ticks up because you’re indulging your most racist advisor’s dream of having his own gestapo, buddy you got yourself stagflation, a seemingly impossible but very real and miserable dynamic that gets closer and closer with each Fed meeting under Trump 2. We’re not there yet, but a stagflationary outline is emerging around us.

So after having his attempt to remove Lisa Cook denied by a district court in his bid to get his own toady into the independent Fed so he can repeat the worst mistakes of the 1970s all at once, Trump is appealing to the only court he knows he can win at: John Roberts’ shambolic Supreme “Court,” America’s most shameless and enthusiastically racist “Court” since Reconstruction. These group of conservative activists cosplaying as serious legal thinkers have invented a Trump doctrine where he is exempt from the Magna Carta and everything which came thereafter, offending the sensibilities of legions of Trump-appointed judges in the lower courts who actually take their jobs somewhat to completely seriously. We live in a world now where six hacks get to decide whether president melting brain gets to pursue his worst impulses, and we may be nearing an endgame of sorts for an economy getting creakier with each Fed meeting.

After losing yet again in the lower courts, Trump is now running to the only dad who does love him, John Roberts, and asking him to tell everyone otherwise. If Roberts takes this up and makes way for Trump to fire Lisa Cook, then that creates a farcical patina of legal precedent to fire the independent Fed governor Trump said he wanted to fire earlier this year. He was talked out of doing this because of the market’s reaction when he said it, and firing Lisa Cook for some sort of made-up cause is his attempt to show Wall Street that he has a court-approved hall pass to appoint himself as Fed Chair.

If he succeeds, then the bedrock of the global financial system has shifted, and I suspect the dollar’s ‘not since 1973‘ down-only march this year is proof of smart money getting out ahead of Trump likely succeeding at what he has long wanted to do, following everything else our institutions have done this year proving themselves to be gobsmackingly weak on a level that Neville Chaimberlain would find uncouth and embarrassing. J.P.Morgan is out here publishing articles titled “Is the US dollar losing its dominance?” and while this is a common form of doomer hype on Wall Street you can find published throughout the decades, the DXY chart is really hard to argue with right now.

YTD performance of major currencies vs USD.

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— George Pearkes (@peark.es) September 16, 2025 at 8:11 AM

American debt, also known as the Treasury Bond market, the largest market in the world, is literally called “risk-free.” It forms the basis of all the math I was taught in finance school, and the world is now reconsidering how much risk is actually attached to the foundation of money as we know it. If there is Trump risk attached not just to our debt, as has been the concern in the bond market all year, but to our monetary policy too, that shifts the flow of where gargantuan amounts of risk-free investments are stashing themselves. Giant European pension funds are already pulling $14 billion out of BlackRock over its abandonment of its climate commitments, and big money around the world has spent the year repositioning its cash positions in other countries as it changes its risk models because our empire is rapidly collapsing.

America is more untrustworthy this year than it was last year, that’s what all the market math this year is saying, and if Trump takes over the Fed, it will constitute an epistemological shock for a global economy centered around a wrongheaded belief that the United States is not a land that wants kings. We appear to be on the economic path to remaking all the worst policy mistakes of the 1970s and 1930s, and given that “sales of heavy trucks are falling like the U.S. is headed for a recession” according to CNBC now, John Roberts really does hold the entire world’s economic future in his hands to some degree. If the Fed loses its independence amidst a recession caused by Trump’s illegal trade and immigration policies, that’s it forever for the very concept of risk-free American debt, another accomplishment we could add to Roberts’ fetid legacy as potentially this country’s worst Chief Justice ever.