The spectacle of a sitting Federal Reserve chair publicly disclosing a criminal investigation into himself is without precedent in modern American governance. Central bankers are designed to be invisible operators ~ technocrats who move interest rates, not headlines. When the head of the world’s most influential central bank steps into the political arena to defend the institution’s independence, something has gone badly wrong in an America that is seeing more wrong than right in recent times.

At the surface, the dispute revolves around renovation costs and congressional testimony. But to treat this episode as a narrow legal or administrative matter is to miss the deeper structural shift it reveals. This is about power. More specifically, it is about whether monetary authority can still exist beyond the reach of political retaliation in an increasingly personalised political system. For decades, the Federal Reserve’s credibility has rested less on law........

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