Appelbaum: Meet the federal debt, the Fed’s actual new boss (sorry, Kevin Warsh)

For the past half-century, policymakers have taken for granted that the Federal Reserve would seek to maintain control over inflation, and that it had the power to do so.

It is time to start rethinking both of those assumptions.

President Donald Trump’s nomination of Kevin Warsh as the next Fed chair is intended to break the Fed’s focus on inflation. Trump made clear that he wanted the Fed to deliver lower interest rates, inflation be damned, and said plainly and publicly that he...