{"id":43171,"date":"2026-09-09T14:15:31","date_gmt":"2026-09-09T18:15:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/?p=43171"},"modified":"2026-09-09T14:51:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-09T18:51:09","slug":"francis-kim-advocates-for-an-independent-federal-reserve","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/francis-kim-advocates-for-an-independent-federal-reserve\/","title":{"rendered":"Francis Kim advocates for an independent Federal Reserve"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Furman University&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/people\/francis-kim\/\">Francis Kim<\/a> is a regular contributor to the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.koreajoongangdaily.com\/opinion\/fed-independence-faces-its-biggest-test-in-75-years\/12856522\">Korea JoongAng Daily<\/a>. In his latest column, Kim, a professor of finance in the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/academics\/business-accounting\/\">Department of Business and Accounting<\/a>, looks at the political pressures placed on the U.S. Federal Reserve to keep interest rates artificially low. Drawing from lessons of the Korean War, Kim cites the government&#8217;s wartime policy of pegging or fixing U.S. Treasury yields at certain levels, which crippled the Fed&#8217;s ability to respond to soaring inflation &#8211; until the Fed and Treasury agreed to keep monetary and fiscal policy separate.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;That 75-year-old principle &#8211; the Treasury does not interfere in monetary policy, and the Fed does not finance government debt &#8211; is again coming under strain today, in a striking echo of that earlier era,&#8221; Kim writes. &#8220;Whatever the debate over Fed independence or whether history is repeating itself, one lesson is clear: When interest rates are left to politics, markets pay the price.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Furman&#8217;s Francis Kim looks back at the 1950s and the lessons learned from the Korean War to underscore the importance of an independent Federal Reserve.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":257,"featured_media":41471,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,6,3524],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business-and-accounting","category-in-the-news","category-the-korea-joongang-daily"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/257"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43171"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43171\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43203,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43171\/revisions\/43203"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/41471"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}