Lest anyone assume that Trump is just tossing around ideas to see what sticks, here’s his running mate Vance speaking to CNN’s Dana Bash: “Whether the country goes to war, what our interest rates are — these are important questions that American democracy should have important answers for.

“And I think all president Trump is saying is that, look, it’s kind of weird that you have so many bureaucrats making so many important decisions. If the American people don’t like our interest rate policy, they should elect somebody different to change that policy. Nothing should be above democratic debate in this country when it comes to the big questions confronting the United States.”

That’s the wrong way to think about it. The American people shouldn’t be choosing their own interest rate policy any more than they should be serving as their own doctors, representing themselves in court or building their own bridges. There are some things that are best left to professionals, and history has shown that to be the case with interest rate policy, too.

It’s true, of course, that democracy should have a say in which professionals are empowered to pull the levers at the Fed, the most important institution in global finance, and indeed that’s already true.

Presidents nominate members to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors for 14-year terms — a period meant in part to shield the board from the political cycle — and also get to nominate the chair and vice chairs for four-year periods.

These professionals are responsible for setting monetary policy. In addition to Powell’s elevation to chair, two members of the seven-member board are Trump appointees. If you gave presidents any more power at the Fed, it would constitute an unfair advantage for the incumbent president.

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History is riddled with examples of why any further intervention by politicians is a bad idea. Richard Nixon nominated Arthur Burns as chairman starting in 1970 with a tacit understanding — that Nixon even joked about at Burns’ swearing-in ceremony — that the former economic counsellor to the president would deliver lower interest rates.

And Nixon regularly talked with the Fed leader in an overly cosy relationship that would be partially blamed for the most inflationary decade in modern American memory — a mess that was only remedied when Paul Volcker became chair and effectively drove the country into recession to restore a stable-price environment. After that, it took decades of work to build up the Fed’s credibility and anchor the public’s inflation expectations.

What concerns me most is that I suspect the Trump-Vance argument is probably good politics but awful policy. In a survey from last year, a plurality of respondents thought the Fed was doing an “only fair” job — similar to the public’s relatively dim view of the Internal Revenue Service.

Republicans in particular give lousy marks to the Fed and many other agencies. Understandably, any American trying to buy a home or a car probably hates that policy rates are at a two-decade high. In reality, the high rates constitute a sometimes painful “medicine” meant to cure the inflation “disease,” but the trade-offs can be hard to explain to a voting public that’s struggling in the here and now.

Granted, many of us in the commentariat criticise individual Fed decisions, and I’m personally on the record in recent weeks complaining about how policymakers have been late to cut rates this cycle. These policymakers are far from perfect. But inflation following the COVID-19 pandemic was a global phenomenon, and policymakers have so far done heroic work to bring it back down without causing a recession.

Given the circumstances, the Powell Fed has been very, very good at its job. Of course, it’s unlikely that they would have been as successful as they were if not for Fed independence and the subdued inflation expectations that came along with it. If Trump gets his way, he could undermine all of that — and also make future presidential elections less fair.