Fed’s Waller: Trump’s threats to Fed independence have so far failed

Waller's remarks matter less as a rebuttal of Trump than as a signal about where the Fed itself locates the guardrails around its independence: Congress and the courts, not the institution's own insulation. That framing implicitly concedes that political pressure is a live variable rather than a settled question, which is precisely what rate-sensitive markets price. The notable gap is that Waller did not identify the pressure he was describing, leaving the scope of the claim untested. Whether Congress and the courts actually function as that backstop is the open question worth tracking.