Mike, on Fed independence, my favorite story is when the evil Arthur Burns arrived in Bonn, appointed by Nixon as ambassador to West Germany after his term at the Fed expired. A local reporter, at Burns’s first press conference, asked him how in the world he could have engineered so much inflation, with such horrific consequences. Didn’t he, as an economist, know better? Burns responded that the head of the Fed must do as the president wants, or otherwise the Fed “would lose its independence.” When I told this story to a former high Fed staffer, now on Wall Street, he told me it was the most damaging (i.e., truthful) thing ever said by any Fed official in the history of the institution. Even under a fiat regime, I would love to see the Fed abolished and the Treasury take over. It would be less deceptive.