Tuesday links

On Fed independence and Franklin Roosevelt, stablecoin legislation, an upcoming conference, and half marathons

Photo by Library of Congress on Unsplash

1. Trump Fires Democrats on Federal Trade Commission, New York Times, March 18, 2025

Since 1935, law has constrained which officers of the government the President can fire after he is sworn in. The precedent that governs that so-called removal authority is Humphrey’s Executor, a case involving the Federal Trade Commission and a Coolidge-appointed Republican who Franklin Roosevelt did not much like.

President Trump is now eager to gut this precedent, which has long been a hindrance to those who espouse to so-called unitary executive theory of presidential administration. That idea means that only the President is charged by the Constitution to see that the laws are faithfully executed. Independent regulators appointed by a president booted from or termed out of office are not so qualified.

I’ll let others weigh in on the history and constitutionality of this theory, but it presents a major problem for the Federal Reserve. Many legal scholars and jurists and even President Trump want this not to be so. They want to bring all administration under presidential control…except for the “monetary policy” of the Federal Reserve. (The most thoughtful articulation of these distinctions is from Aditya Bamzai and Aaron Nielson.)

I do not buy this argument, as I have argued elsewhere, for two reasons. Modern central banking, as it is practiced today, bears almost no resemblance to the banking practices of the early Republic. In its many moving parts, it is implemented through the power of regulation, supervision, and seignorage. If Humphrey’s falls, the single most important element of independent central banking falls with it.

2. Stablecoin Bill on Track to Advance in House Committee, Bloomberg, March 21, 2025

There is a version of crypto enthusiasm that leaves me cold. That version is that a group of libertarian-ish techno-groksters understood through deep study all that ails the monetary, payments, banking, political, humanitarian, psychological, and species-level system in a way that we mere mortals can never grasp. All others must join that movement or yield to its inevitability.

This is a very silly vision of crypto. It is also, I would argue, the dominant one. For that reason, through most of my career, I have kept my distance. The most obvious—and the most dominant—use case for crypto is money laundering. The second is gambling. The third is…something else?

Enter the GENIUS Act, a backronym in the great tradition of American legislation (the PATRIOT Act, the JOBS Act, the STOCK Act, etc etc etc). The GENIUS Act seeks to bring stablecoin in from the cold, validating it, chartering it within (or close to the banking perimeter), and giving it access to the faith-and-credit of the government.

Given my skeptical preamble to crypto above, you would think I would be four-square against the GENIUS Act. But I am not. I wouldn’t give it three cheers, but I would give it one. If I were a Senator, I would vote for it.

My main motivation is precisely because of how terribly we run our current digital payments system, with so many obvious loopholes and so few incentives for good actors who want to participate in this ecosystem to do so without facilitating human trafficking, etc. The modern anti-money laundering system depends on a vast apparatus of public-private cooperation to succeed. Where a link becomes weak, criminality flourishes, hydraulically, by seeking out precisely that weakness. “Why do the really awful ones bank here?” a TD Bank employee asked a colleague in a message later discovered in the investigation of the largest bank money-laundering scheme in US history. “Because…we are convenient.”

The most convenient way to launder money in 2025 is through stablecoin. The GENIUS Act will contribute to solving this problem. I would support it on that basis.

3. Annual Wharton Financial Regulation Conference, April 25, 2025.

Eight years ago, my colleague David Zaring and I founded the annual Wharton Financial Regulation Conference, or Wharton FinReg. This year, our colleague Brian Feinstein is hosting. The lineup is sensational, including a fireside keynote with former CFPB Director Rohit Chopra and fascinating papers on all areas of financial regulation. This is primarily aimed at academics and policymakers, but if you are interested in learning more, shoot Brian Feinstein an email.

4. Results for First State Half Marathon, March 2025

On Saturday, I ran my first half marathon.¹ The disqualification time was 3 hrs and 30 mins. My 13 mile test run the week before was about 3 hours, with plenty of walking. I feared that I would come in dead last, if I was lucky to finish at all.

The race went so much better than that. I clocked 2 hours 22 mins, averaging 10 min 52 second miles. At about mile 4, I blistered on both feet, but never broke pace. It was also the first time I experienced the runner’s high, which had previously struck me as a conspiracy by runners against the rest of us so that we would take up their sado-masochism in the always-delayed expectation of dopamine that would never quite arrive. Especially compared to the almost immediate dopamine flood from “the pump,” the closest analogue from power lifting, my hundreds of running miles over the years convinced me that runners were lying or I was genetically maladapted or maybe both.

But no, it really worked. And I had no real negative effects to my body. I had some mild stiffness in my hips on the day, but that was gone by Sunday, a day when I absolutely dominated my 14-year-old at 1-on-1 basketball (I knocked him about like a beach ball, it was so much fun). Even my blisters are gone today.

What I did not expect at all was how emotional the race would be. From the first minute, I had tears in my eyes that came back at various points during the race. I put together a play list to accompany me along the way consisting of music with specific memories, not just up tempo jams to keep me in pace. I put it on random and let it carry me, including the first song - Blood by the Middle East, perhaps my favorite indie song of all time - which made the entire race feel like I was floating. Then came some Kendrick Lamar, my constant gym buddy from the late 2010s; then Sabotage by the Beastie Boys, the song to which I first pulled 1,000 lbs; then The Distance by Cake, the favorite song of a brother-in-law I never met because he died two years before Nikki came into my life; then The Middle by Jimmy Eat World, a classic cover that the Conti-Browns play in our family band; and on and on and on. The playlist kept hitting me, reminding me what it means to feel deeply and live deeply. That running pace, mile after mile after mile between 10 mins and 11 mins per mile, merged into that same deep living.

At mile 10, six miles after blisters and when my energy started to flag, I asked myself whether it was time to walk. I wanted very much not to walk. And I wanted very much to walk. I wanted both things, for different reasons, and the battle came back and forth, constantly. I started measuring my success by 50 yard increments. Those last miles were brutal.

I never walked. The blisters, ironically enough, helped here, since I realized that walking would not be any easier on my feet. More than that, I kept imagining my Conti-Brown boys confronting various challenges in their times. It felt like I was cutting a path that would remind us all that we are built to tackle hard things. Like the great philosopher Ted Lasso said, taking on a challenge is like riding a horse. If it’s comfortable, you’re probably doing it wrong. Conti-Browns can do hard things, we remind ourselves regularly. This was a hard thing.

I am still floating still.

1. Technically, it was my second, but the Rocky Run I ran in November is a 5k followed by a 30 minute break then a 10 mile run. It was also mobbed by a lot of people wearing Apollo Creed boxer shorts and an oppressively loud loop of Gonna Fly Now. I don’t count it.