House Speaker Mike Johnson’s “disenchanted” with Jerome Powell.

That’s Johnson’s word. “Disenchanted.” He used it during an interview with Bloomberg ahead of what’ll be a very long summer vacation for House Republicans.

If I were Johnson and I had any shame, I’d be in the house, small “h,” right now, which is to say I’d be avoiding the American public. After all, Johnson just sent GOP lawmakers home early just so they wouldn’t have to go on record voting against the release of additional information about Jeffrey Epstein. That’d be the same kind of information the same Mike Johnson repeatedly insisted should be released to the American public.

But Johnson, like almost all Republicans on Capitol Hill, has no shame whatever, so it wasn’t especially surprising to hear him deride a man of comparatively saint-like virtue for being a poor steward of the public trust. “I think all the scrutiny is appropriate,” he said, referring to the Trump administration’s pressure campaign against Powell in the course of suggesting he could, under certain circumstances, support “modifying” (Bloomberg’s word) the laws which delineate the Fed’s purpose and role in the US economy. “The devil’s in the details,” he said. (No Mike, the devil’s in the Oval.)

In the latest Weekly, I discussed the extent to which the market’s already pricing an erosion of Fed independence. As it happens, Bloomberg picked up on that Wednesday, noting the sharp escalation in dovish Fed wagers for 2026.

There’s the chart. Or a version of it. There are any number of ways to illustrate the same dynamic. The point is just that the market’s now fully pricing three quarter-point cuts for next year plus some chance of a fourth. In the linked Bloomberg piece, Ye Xie quotes Rabobank’s Philip Marey, who now expects 100bps of Fed cuts in 2026.

As it happens, Marey penned Rabobank’s Global Daily on Wednesday. In that dispatch, he called it “ironic” that Miki Bowman was on CNBC “paying lip service to Fed independence” while simultaneously emphasizing that with independence “comes an obligation for transparency and accountability.”

“Perhaps,” Marey dryly remarked, Bowman “could give us some ‘transparency’ and ‘accountability’ about her remarkable conversion from überhawk in September last year, when she voted against a 50bps rate cut because of inflation concerns, to ultra-dove now, pursuing an early rate cut in July.”

He went on to ask, rhetorically, whether “last month’s promotion to Vice Chair for Supervision by President Trump [has] anything to do with it?”

Miki would tell you “no.” And she’d be a liar. Just like Chris Waller would be a liar if he said his call for a rate cut this month wasn’t motivated, at least in part, by an inclination to ingratiate himself to Trump.

I hate to be “that guy,” really I do. But I’d be completely remiss not to call this a mirror image of what’s happened to the Supreme Court. The Fed’s being subjected to institutional capture by the executive. Waller and Bowman are the Fed analogues to Thomas and Alito.

To say otherwise is to be deliberately obtuse, to persist in willful denial or both. I certainly hope at least some folks on Wall Street will have to fortitude (and the job security) to call this what it is.