The Crack
Zero rates during 9% inflation. High rates during 3% inflation. Powell's video can't explain why.
The frame holds for two minutes and seven seconds. Jerome Powell. Alone. No board members. No Treasury Secretary. No institutional buffer. Just the Federal Reserve Chair staring into a camera, addressing an entity the Fed has ignored for one hundred eleven years: the people.
Sunday night, January 11, 2026. Posted without notice. Powell’s face carries the pallor of a man watching the floor crack.
“On Friday, the Department of Justice served the Federal Reserve with grand jury subpoenas, threatening a criminal indictment related to my testimony before the Senate Banking Committee last June.”
Criminal indictment. Grand jury. The Chair.
The testimony concerned renovations. Two and a half billion dollars spent on historic buildings. Then the pivot: “This unprecedented action should be seen in the broader context of the Administration’s threats.”
He transforms investigation into persecution. Recasts evidence as intimidation. Wraps himself in independence. Claims the threat is retaliation for setting rates based on evidence, not presidential preference.
The numbers prove otherwise.
The Timeline
March 2020. COVID hits. The Fed drops rates to zero, launches unlimited quantitative easing, explodes its balance sheet from $4.2 trillion to $9 trillion in eighteen months.
June 2021. Inflation accelerates. Powell calls it transitory. Rates stay at zero.
June 2022. Inflation hits nine point one percent. Powell pivots. Zero to five point five in sixteen months.
Inflation falls through 2023. Four percent. Then three point five. The medicine works.
Powell refuses. Holds rates at five point five through all of 2024. Inflation declines. Growth slows. He does not move.
November 2024. Trump wins.
December 2024. Powell signals rate cuts won’t come fast.
The economy under Biden received zero rates and unlimited QE despite nine percent inflation. The economy under Trump receives five point five percent rates despite three percent inflation.
Evidence-based monetary policy. Independent analysis.
The Words He Used
The statement runs two minutes seven seconds. Every word written, reviewed, approved. Return to the opening: “That testimony concerned, in part, a multi-year project to renovate historic Federal Reserve office buildings.”
In part.
The June testimony wasn’t only about renovations.
He doesn’t specify what else.
Then: “Those are pretexts. The threat of criminal charges is a consequence of the Federal Reserve setting interest rates based on our best assessment... rather than following the preferences of the President.”
He’s not arguing the testimony was accurate. He’s arguing the investigation is political.
If your testimony was truthful, why does the investigator’s motivation matter? Truth survives scrutiny.
His response isn’t receipts. It’s claiming that asking for receipts equals intimidation.
The First Temple
Philadelphia, 1832. Nicholas Biddle ran the Second Bank of the United States from a marble temple. Controlled twenty percent of the currency. Believed the Bank was sacred. The only thing preventing chaos.
Andrew Jackson saw foreign ownership. Insider loans. Credit manipulation for political purposes. An unelected institution claiming public service while serving shareholders.
Jackson vetoed the recharter. Biddle engineered contraction. Called in loans. Tightened credit. Created the panic he claimed only the Bank could prevent. Make the economy scream. Blame Jackson. Force surrender.
Merchants begged Jackson to relent.
He asked one question: “Who called your loans?”
The Bank, sir.
Jackson pointed north. “Go to the man who has the power to end this. Nicholas Biddle sits with full vaults and chooses not to restore your credit. He manufactures your suffering to break me. And you ask me to surrender?”
Jackson drained the power. Removed federal deposits. Distributed them to state banks. Without federal money, the Bank was just another institution. The mystique evaporated. By 1836 the charter expired. By 1841 the Bank failed.
Biddle died facing fraud charges, still convinced he’d defended civilization.
He was defending institutional power against accountability.
Same playbook. Different century.
The Frame
Powell’s claim: “This is about whether the Fed will be able to continue to set interest rates based on evidence and economic conditions, or whether, instead, monetary policy will be directed by political pressure.”
Fed operations represent evidence. Any pressure represents politics. Question policy, attack independence.
Jackson didn’t argue theory. He asked who benefited and who suffered. He followed the money.
If Powell truly set rates based on evidence without political consideration, policy would be consistent. The appropriate rate for three percent inflation doesn’t change based on election results.
The rates shifted when political conditions changed. Zero during Biden despite high inflation. Five point five during Trump despite falling inflation.
Too precise.
The Crack
The DOJ doesn’t issue grand jury subpoenas for theater. They investigate criminal conduct. Powell calling this unprecedented isn’t accurate. What’s unprecedented is a Fed Chair warranting criminal investigation.
Either the DOJ manufactures charges from nothing, or the Fed Chair’s conduct warranted scrutiny. Powell wants you to assume the first.
His video makes examination inevitable.
If the testimony was accurate, Powell wins. Investigation confirms his version. Independence is reinforced.
If the testimony was inaccurate, the video becomes evidence of consciousness of guilt. He knew scrutiny would reveal discrepancies. He chose to delegitimize the investigation before evidence emerged because evidence couldn’t exonerate him.
The video exists because a quiet investigation threatened worse exposure.
The Zero
Andrew Jackson died with a bullet near his heart. Twenty-nine years after the duel. The lead never stopped grinding. Jackson claimed it was his compass. Every throb pointed toward enemies.
He killed the Second Bank. Zeroed the national debt. The only time in American history.
The idea didn’t die. It hibernated. Emerged from Jekyll Island in 1910 with better camouflage. Called itself the Federal Reserve. Learned from Biddle’s mistake. Too visible, too powerful.
The Fed would be technical, boring, wrapped in jargon.
For one hundred eleven years it worked.
Complexity fails when math exposes it. Zero rates during high inflation then high rates during low inflation is political timing. Claiming criminal investigation equals intimidation prevents examination.
Powell’s video made the political nature explicit. He argued setting rates against presidential preference justified his actions. That concedes the Fed operates politically. The only question is whether Fed political judgment should override democratic political judgment.
Jackson’s zero proved self-governance was possible.
That zero existed. It can exist again.
It will exist again.
Ending the Fed doesn’t require revolution. It requires Jackson’s mechanism. Remove the deposits. Let currencies compete. The temple doesn’t need to burn. It just needs to be empty.
Visible
Powell’s video marks the moment defense became unsustainable.
The Fed can no longer claim independence while exercising political policy. Can no longer claim expertise while producing contradictory results. Can no longer claim necessity while refusing accountability.
The crack is visible now. The bullet Jackson carried twenty-nine years is pointing north again. Toward Philadelphia where Biddle’s temple fell. Toward the DC swamp where Powell’s temple stands.
Powell wrapped himself in independence. The video showed the lie crack.
His real fear isn’t economic chaos. It’s accountability.
That admission brings the temple down.
<3EKO
This week I’m releasing my first work on the Founding Fathers. Examining the man they call the Father of our Country. GEORGE drops Wednesday.
This spring: JACKSON: BLOOD VETO. The complete story of the only president who killed a central bank, zeroed the national debt, and survived assassination by refusing to fall.
Pattern recognition requires seeing what’s actually there.
The audit is coming.
Good summary EKO.
The tell, a bit of poker jargon, is that the DOJ issued the criminal referral.
When one cannot audit a private institution, which the Fed most certainly is, the only way one can crystallize elucidation is to utilize the discovery process in a criminal or civil proceeding.
What the DOJ has very cleverly done here is to bypass the OWNED AND OPERATED CONGRESS, which I may add, has refused to audit the Fed every single time the subject is brought up.
What Trump has done, is to force the audit using the criminal & civil process of discovery. Any refutation of compliance with compelled discovery then holds the obfuscatory party in contempt of court and subject to criminal and / or civil sanction. The secondary benefit is the use of the age old wisdom, "Me thinks thou doth protest too much" if and when the defendant(s) / respondent(s) feign persecution by the line of discovery questioning and try to gaslight their way out of an ever shrinking toolbox of options to escape accountability. It's simply bad optics by that time and each new utterance of privilege is met by an increasingly cacophonous public that has and IS being strip mined for taxes to pay for grift at every level of government as well as the chicanery of the Fed.
And this is the key phrase: " Let currencies compete"...if that is done, the only "money" left standing is gold, seconded by silver...the only two forms of trade authorized by Congress and recognized universally. The US is bankrupt with zero possibility of repaying debts. The only options are default or inflation. Simple logic and math.