What happens to central banks under pressure?

Summary

Planet Money (NPR)

Episode: What happens to central banks under pressure?

Date: September 6, 2025

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Brief Overview

This episode delves into the critical importance of central bank independence and the dangers posed when political forces attempt to undermine it. Through the perspectives of three renowned "central bank watchers"—Carolina Garriga, Lev Menand, and Carola Binder—the hosts unpack what defines central bank independence, how it can erode, and why regaining trust is so difficult once lost. The discussion draws on historical and recent global examples, examining both statutory rules (de jure) and practical implementation (de facto), and focuses particularly on the current situation in the United States.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Watchers: Who Watches Central Banks and Why?

• Carolina Garriga is introduced as a "watcher" of central banks, tasked with monitoring challenges to their independence worldwide.
• She traces her origin to Argentina, a "canary in the coal mine" for politically pressured banking, recalling family accounts of inflation-driven shortages.
• Example cited: Turkey, where presidential influence led to massive inflation and loss of monetary credibility (01:18–02:18).

"Turkey is another poster child of what not to do with monetary authorities."
— Carolina Garriga, 01:44

2. The Harm: What Happens When Independence Fades?

• Loss of independence correlates with higher volatility, inflation, and long-term economic instability (02:38–03:16).
• Unique global ramifications when the U.S. dollar’s credibility is threatened, due to its use as a reserve currency (03:01–03:16).

"None of those are good things. And none of those things are easy to fix once they're unleashed."
— Carolina Garriga, 03:16

3. Where Central Banks Came From and Why Independence Matters

• The modern central bank model grew from British and American "missionary work" in the 20th century (06:02–06:58).
• The last 50 years have seen an increasing emphasis on keeping central banks separate from political cycles (07:02–07:18).
• Political meddling leads to short-term gains but long-term pain (07:18–08:55).

"The harm is that monetary policy decisions may be made by political interests that can cause damage in the long term."
— Carolina Garriga, 07:22

4. Measuring Independence: A Search for Better Metrics

• Lev Menand and colleagues revisit how independence is defined, challenging previous indices that overlooked loopholes, e.g., a long governor term is meaningless if the executive can dismiss at will (10:19–13:04).
• Their research involves granular, subjective coding of legal features and surveying actual central bank officials (13:24–16:15).

"It's not worth much to have an eight year term if you can be removed at will."
— Lev Menand, 12:41

• Fundamental divide highlighted: laws on the books (de jure) vs. actual practice (de facto) (16:15–17:47).

"You could have a state of the art central banking statute ... but there's no rule of law ... then there's no de facto independence, even if you're a 10 out of 10 on de jure independence."
— Lev Menand, 16:51

5. Beyond Rules: Watching What Central Banks Actually Do

• Carola Binder studies actual central bank behavior in response to political pressure, drawing on nuanced, narrative-based news reports (19:41–21:41).
• Finds that about 10% of central banks are pressured annually, and nearly 40% between 2010–2018 (22:10–22:53).
• Pressure is almost always directed toward looser monetary policy (cutting rates), as seen in Turkey and the U.S. (22:53–23:22).
• Central banks succumbing to pressure consistently see spikes in inflation (23:22–23:55).

"If a country goes from there not being any reports ... then suddenly one quarter they start facing [pressure]. What happens to inflation afterwards?"
— Carola Binder, 22:21

6. Why Is Independence So Hard to Win Back?

• Once lost, it may take decades and painful reforms to rebuild credibility—see the U.S. after the Nixon era (25:00–26:03).

"Building institutions takes decades, but destroying institutions take very little time."
— Carolina Garriga, 25:13

• Increasing political consolidation (e.g., transition to presidential systems) exacerbates pressure (24:54).

7. Current U.S. Context

• Discussion of Trump’s public pressure campaigns on the Federal Reserve, attempts to remove board members, and the unprecedented legal battles currently shaping U.S. central banking (26:18–27:16).

"We have the United States scored as having independence ... But if courts ... determine that for cause doesn’t really mean anything, then we maybe don’t have this scored right."
— Lev Menand, 26:48

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• On Central Bank Pressures and Global Ripples:
  "The dollar in itself is a matter of concern for most countries in the world. If there is loss of credibility ... this will have a rippling effect."
  — Carolina Garriga, 09:35

• On Research Methodologies:
  "Somebody has to read the whole statute and go through and decide, is this a one or zero on this dimension?"
  — Lev Menand, 13:56

• On Regaining Lost Independence:
  "The trust in the system or the long term trust in the institutions is hurt. And that takes a long time to rebuild."
  — Carolina Garriga, 25:42

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [00:20–01:24]: Introduction to "central bank watchers" and real-world consequences of political meddling.
• [03:01–03:16]: Unique global significance of U.S. central bank independence.
• [05:36–08:55]: Historical sweep: From 1600s to the modern era and the case for independence.
• [10:19–16:15]: Lev Menand’s overhaul of how independence is measured.
• [19:41–23:22]: Carola Binder’s shift from rules to observed behaviors and pressure patterns.
• [25:00–26:03]: History and difficulty of regaining independence post-political interference (U.S. in the 1970s).
• [26:18–27:16]: Current U.S. legal challenges and implications for independence.

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Conclusion

This episode illuminates the fragility and paramount importance of central bank independence, mixing academic rigor with lively, real-world storytelling. Through the work of “watchers,” the complexities of institutional design, enforcement, and credibility are deftly unpacked, cautioning listeners that “as goes your central bank, so goes the fate of your economy.” The episode is particularly timely given the pressing challenges facing the U.S. Federal Reserve today.

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Transcript

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[Erica Barris]

This is Planet Money from NPR. Carolina Garriga is a watcher. Not a periscope out the submarine, binoculars in the bunker kind of watcher, but her scholarly job is to be a kind of lookout for trouble in central banks across the world.

[Mary Childs]

She's looking for signs, checking to see if these ideally independent guardians of economic stability, from the Central bank of Kenya to the bank of Japan, have maybe become vulnerable to political influence.

[Erica Barris]

Have you been especially busy lately?

[Carolina Garriga]

Yes, yes, yes. It's keeping up with the news is becoming a new job for me.

[Erica Barris]

These days, Carolina isn't usually following political dramas at our central bank, the U.S. federal Reserve. She's more used to looking elsewhere, like her native Argentina, where the president famously pressured the central bank to do what the president wanted, and it did.

[Carolina Garriga]

And that resulted in spiraling inflation, loss of credibility in the currency.

[Erica Barris]

By this time, Carolina was no longer living in Argentina, but she had family back home. And when she'd call them, they would.

[Carolina Garriga]

Say, well, we went to three supermarkets. Because in this supermarket, either the oil was too expensive or there was no.

[Mary Childs]

More oil inflation shortages. Carolina saw the same thing play out a few years later in Turkey.

[Carolina Garriga]

Turkey is another poster child of what not to do with monetary authorities.

[Erica Barris]

Turkey also had an independent central bank, but the president wanted lower interest rates, so he started firing and hiring, firing and hiring until he got them. What were you thinking as you were watching that happen?

[Carolina Garriga]

So, yes, that was a pretty clear example of what happens when you mess with central banks.

[Erica Barris]

Turkey's inflation rose to around 80%. And these days, people are not lining up to loan Turkey money or invest in the country.

[Mary Childs]

Carolina has watched these same patterns in Belarus and Zimbabwe and Hungary. And now she is watching the early phases of central bank independence erosion play out here in the US and she's like, this is not great.

[Erica Barris]

It's.

[Mary Childs]

Why?

[Carolina Garriga]

Because we know the consequences and because, hey, bank research showing that when central bank independence goes down, inflation volatility goes up. I mean, we have a wealth of data showing that central bank independence is associated with a lot of good economic outcomes. It's one of the pillars of rational policymaking in economics.

[Mary Childs]

And in the case of the US, Everybody uses dollars all over the world, so everybody is tied to us. So the consequences, higher inflation, volatility, loss.

[Erica Barris]

Of credibility none of those are good things.

[Carolina Garriga]

None of those are good things. And none of those things are easy to fix once they're unleashed.

[Erica Barris]

Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Erica Barris.

[Mary Childs]

And I'm Mary Child. Our own president waging a war with the Federal Reserve. It's time to check in with the central bank watchers. These watchers have had their eyes trained on central banks all over the world. They've had their little notebooks out for years, scribbling down their observations, trying to gauge just how independent of political pressure all these central banks actually are or were. And what happens when one loses that independence.

[Erica Barris]

Today on the show, we sidle up next to three of the leading central bank watchers to watch what they're watching. Because as goes your central bank, so goes the fate of your economy.

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[Erica Barris]

Today, pretty much every country has a central bank. They handle a country's currency. They set monetary policy like setting interest rates. The central idea of a central bank is to keep a country's economy stable. And they have a long history. Starts in the 1600s, but that is way too far back.

[Carolina Garriga]

Okay, so we're not going to talk about the 1600?

[Erica Barris]

No, we're not. We're not the version that we are thinking of right now when we talk about a central bank.

[Mary Childs]

Carolina Garriga again, by the way. She's a professor of political science at the University of Essex in the UK. And we had her jump forward to the 1900s, when the British created a sort of central bank prototype, the bank of England. And they felt like they had really figured out how to manage a country's money. So they sent people out to spread the word.

[Carolina Garriga]

And there were missions sent by the Crown to different countries to help countries set up central banks.

[Erica Barris]

So they were like central bank missionaries.

[Carolina Garriga]

Yes, converting governments into the scientific way to deal with money, if you want.

[Mary Childs]

And there was this one economist, an American monetary missionary, if you will, who was especially influential, Edwin Kammerer. He helped set up the Federal Reserve in the US and he traveled everywhere, like Poland, all over Latin America, helping set up or tweak their central banks.

[Erica Barris]

And eventually everyone adopted it.

[Carolina Garriga]

Yeah. The idea is how to provide stability to the economy.

[Erica Barris]

It was only over the past 50 years that the idea of central bank independence started to take hold around the.

[Mary Childs]

World, independent of politics. Meaning central banks should think about the long term health of the economy, not just what it looks like during a reelection campaign.

[Erica Barris]

Because what is the harm if a central bank is not independent?

[Carolina Garriga]

The harm is that monetary policy decisions may be made by political interests that can cause damage in the long term.

[Mary Childs]

Carolina says the whole reason to watch central banks and evaluate how independent they are is because, as her research shows, that will actually give you a pretty good indication of what a country's economy will do.

[Erica Barris]

And Carolina, our first watcher, she has spent a lot of time sorting through years of data to show exactly that link between central banks losing their independence and economic troubles.

[Mary Childs]

But first she had to look at the statutes and bylaws of 192 countries. She read all of them.

[Carolina Garriga]

Well, what I do in my research is I went and read the laws, all the central bank laws from 1970 until 23.

[Erica Barris]

That must have been so much to read.

[Carolina Garriga]

That was many years. But yes.

[Mary Childs]

And as she read them, she asked, for example, how long are central bank governors appointed for? Can a central bank governor hold another job in government like, say, in the Ministry of Finance? That may be a conflict of interest. What are the actual objectives of the bank? Like, Are they focused just on inflation or are their goals very broad, potentially opening them up to political interference?

[Carolina Garriga]

Even if you have an autonomous central banker, the objectives are so broad and sometimes conflicting that open the central bank to political interference. So all these things are in the metrics of central bank independence.

[Erica Barris]

And by cross checking those questions with economic data on Things like inflation and unemployment. Carolina has created her own big data set that shows that in countries where central banks have become less independent, like in Belarus, Turkmenistan, Venezuela, the economies have suffered more inflation and volatility.

[Mary Childs]

And in countries that have had reforms to make more independent central banks like Croatia and Morocco, their economies have been more stable.

[Erica Barris]

And now Carolina, says Trump threatening the independence of the central bank in the US it has uniquely huge implications because our money is used all over the world.

[Carolina Garriga]

The dollar in itself is a matter of concern for most countries in the world. If there is inflation or if there is loss of credibility of monetary policy or of the dollar, this will have rippling effect.

[Erica Barris]

This will have a rippling effect in.

[Carolina Garriga]

A way that smaller economies don't have the potential to disrupt in that way.

[Mary Childs]

So Carolina was our watcher number one. Watcher number two is looking from a different vantage point. The focus of his work is to more clearly define the most basic question. What even makes a central bank independent? Do we know what exactly exposes a central bank to political influence in the first place?

[Lev Menand]

And so we set out to build a better mousetrap.

[Erica Barris]

Lev Menand researches and teaches monetary systems at Columbia Law School. And some years ago, he heard from an economist he'd worked with at the New York Fed, Tobias Adrian Lev says he'd always admired him, but only from.

[Lev Menand]

A distance, because he was this economist who published, you know, six, like groundbreaking papers per year. And I was a kid who hadn't even gotten a PhD in economics, which.

[Mary Childs]

I never did by the time Tobias called, it was years later. Now Lev was a well known legal scholar and Tobias was pretty senior at the International Monetary Fund, the imf. And what Tobias wanted was Lev's help.

[Erica Barris]

See, a major function of the IMF is to lend money to countries so they can grow. But it's a loan, not a gift.

[Mary Childs]

They want their loans to be good.

[Lev Menand]

Yes, they want their loans to be repaid. So they have a whole staff of people that collect and analyze central bank statutes from every country in the world. And they reached out to me so that we could talk about would it be of interest to me to work with this database to try to answer research questions?

[Mary Childs]

Would it ever? Lev and Tobias and their co author Ashraf Khan, also from the imf, they meet for the first time over zoom to talk about what they could do with this database. And it turns out it's a lot.

[Lev Menand]

We camp with like 10 things to do and we're still on the first one. Let's just be clear. We haven't even Finished the first one.

[Mary Childs]

You're just in the first inning.

[Lev Menand]

Yes. And we, we may never finish the baseball game, but in this first inning.

[Erica Barris]

They saw an opening. See. Lev says researchers had been using these indexes from some famous papers from the 90s to measure the relative independence of different central banks. But Levin Co. Saw some room for improvement.

[Lev Menand]

There's this one index that became very prominent that in my opinion made some pretty bad judgment calls about whether certain legal features made it a central bank more or less autonomous.

[Mary Childs]

Like, one way to get points for being independent was if the head of your central bank had a longer tenure.

[Lev Menand]

And then you would get points for things like protection from removal at will.

[Erica Barris]

Protection from the president just firing you and installing someone more to their liking.

[Lev Menand]

The point that we made is it's not worth much to have an eight year term if you can be removed at will. And so it's kind of a mistake to give any points at all for an eight year term unless it's paired with a restriction on the executive's power to remove the central bank head.

[Mary Childs]

There were a bunch of things like this.

[Lev Menand]

You do get excited when you see something in the literature that creates an opening for a contribution by oneself. That is, yes, that is an exciting feeling. Like, oh, wow. Like this is something we can work on.

[Mary Childs]

In their zoom room, Lev and his two future co authors are like, so if those assumptions were kind of wacky and we have this great new IMF database, we can just make a better index.

[Erica Barris]

So they enlist research assistants at the imf. They start sifting through all the different laws governing central banks in all the different countries. And they also do a big survey of 87 central bank officials. And with all that information, they assign each rule governing central banks a score.

[Lev Menand]

Somebody has to read the whole statute and go through and decide, is this a one or zero on this dimension? Is it a one or a zero on that dimension?

[Mary Childs]

So you have all these IMF research assistants and they've got their red marker and their green marker and they go through and they're like, I think it's.

[Lev Menand]

A little bit more digital than that. You have like an analog vision of how this looks, but always. But they have an Excel spreadsheet and they go through.

[Mary Childs]

You can code those red or green.

[Lev Menand]

You could, you could put colors. I think some of our spreadsheets have colors.

[Mary Childs]

Thank you for granting me that.

[Erica Barris]

As to what to highlight in green and what's a highlight in red, this is the important part, the hard part, because these choices, deciding what defines central bank independence they are not arbitrary, but they are subjective.

[Mary Childs]

For example, one of the indices from the 90s ranked rules about when or how the central bank can lend money as way more important than setting monetary policy, which to Lev and his co authors seemed arbitrary. So in their surveys, they asked central bank officials to help weight each rule more thoughtfully. But even amongst their own team, there was a lot of debate, granular, painstaking debate.

[Lev Menand]

Oh, you thought that, you thought that.

[Mary Childs]

For example, at first one of their metrics was the to get a high independent score. Can the central bank lend to the government directly? You want the answer to be no.

[Erica Barris]

That's what Argentina was doing. But a lot of governments do permit their central banks to lend directly to them on a short term basis. In their survey, central bank officials said that was different and less bad than lending long term. So Lev and his team broke out that distinction and weighted it accordingly. Then there was that metric from the 90s that had bothered Lev that assigned independence points for central bankers getting long terms, even if they can also be easily fired.

[Lev Menand]

We didn't give credit for legal features that suggested independence. When they were paired with loopholes that totally undermined any independence those features would have provided.

[Mary Childs]

So yours is like a layering effect, yours is an if then kind of criteria.

[Lev Menand]

Exactly. We put together like five things and said you got to have all of these to get any credit under our index on this dimension of independence.

[Erica Barris]

Ultimately, Lev and his colleagues have come up with A list of 10 updated metrics of central bank independence.

[Mary Childs]

But like he said, this is only their first inning. And especially while he is watching President Trump's current pressure on the Fed, he's already noting a shortcoming in their new metrics.

[Erica Barris]

Because they're based on laws and statutes, everything written down and codified about how these central banks are supposed to work. They represent what's called de jure independence, independence by law. But laws don't tell you how people act. That is de facto independence.

[Lev Menand]

You could have a state of the art central banking statute that it's perfect, but there's no rule of law. And so the President of the country can come along and just threaten to kidnap the central bankers if they don't do what he says, then there's no de facto independence, even if you're a 10 out of 10 on de jure independence.

[Mary Childs]

So laws need to be enforced, laws.

[Lev Menand]

Need to be enforced. And legal culture is absolute critical ingredient in American success. And part of what's so distressing about the last year is a pretty dramatic degradation of our legal culture. It's just been a constant unraveling. And who cares what the Federal Reserve act says at a certain point if it's just a if it's not followed.

[Mary Childs]

If it's just a piece of paper with some words on it.

[Lev Menand]

Yeah.

[Erica Barris]

After the break, we meet a central bank watcher who's looking at not just what central banks say, but what they actually do. Foreign.

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[Mary Childs]

So we have peered over the shoulder of watcher number one, Carolina, comparing the bylaws of central banks over time to see which of them result in economic trouble.

[Erica Barris]

And watcher number two, Lev, trying to better distinguish which rules protect a central bank from political influence.

[Mary Childs]

Now, watcher number three, her name is Carola Binder. She's an economist at UT Austin. And she is focused not on rules, but but on action de facto, not de jure.

[Erica Barris]

Carola's research looks at when and where central banks are being pressured and what they are doing in response. Her journey started in 2018, a time of placid economic conditions, a time when the rate of price increases was like 2% per year and pretty much nobody was thinking about inflation. But Carola was.

[Carola Binder]

I kind of like to think of it as the year of politicization of central banks. You know, they've always been under political pressure, but I think it got a lot more attention worldwide in 2018 because.

[Mary Childs]

All of a sudden, President Trump one year into his first term at that point started tweeting critically about the Fed that the president would weigh in. Like that was very new new.

[Erica Barris]

But also right around then, other central bank pressure situations were unfolding around the world. And Turkey was starting to look kind of pressure y things were starting to percolate in India.

[Mary Childs]

And Carol is watching all of this start to bubble up and she wants to know how common is this? How often are central banks pressured and what happens after that? Like, it's one thing to have laws written down that say our central bank is super independent, but to Carola, what might really matter is a more narrative read of the situation. Not the rules that Carolina and Lev have looked at, but the behaviors. So Carola decides to look at the period from 2010 right up to the very moment when she's reading the reports in 2018. She looks for data that can show her not just what the laws say, but what central banks actually do. And she finds two data sources that would fit the bill.

[Carola Binder]

The method that I used was with the help of some of my research assistants to read through these country level reports that are put out by Economist Intelligence Unit and Business Monitor International for nearly every country.

[Erica Barris]

Basically news sources narrating in real time what pressure central banks were facing and what they were doing about it.

[Carola Binder]

And we would read through and see whether there was any mention of political pressure on that particular bank in that quarter.

[Mary Childs]

In her data set, she was looking for specific things.

[Carola Binder]

It would have to say something like, we anticipate that the central bank might cut interest rates due to pressure from the government. It would be pretty explicit.

[Erica Barris]

That's pretty explicit, yes.

[Mary Childs]

In super authoritarian countries that totally control their central banks like China, Carola is just not interested in them. She's focused on these moments of change, situations in flux.

[Carola Binder]

If a country goes from there not being any reports that they're facing pressure, then suddenly one quarter they start facing it. What happens to inflation afterwards?

[Erica Barris]

And Carola found of her pool of central banks around the world, on any given year, 10% of them were getting political pressure at least.

[Carola Binder]

If anything, the 10% is like the lowest estimate because there could have been political pressure that was so sly that the analysts writing these country reports didn't know about it over the whole time.

[Mary Childs]

Sample from 2010 to 2018, almost 40% of central banks reportedly had political pressure or interference. And the pressure Xi saw most often to cut interest rates. Exactly what President Trump is pressuring the Fed to do right now.

[Erica Barris]

The pressure was so directional in her data set.

[Carola Binder]

In fact, there's almost no exceptions there. Okay, okay. There were one or two cases where I think Republicans in the US were saying that the Fed needed to tighten.

[Mary Childs]

Monetary policy, meaning to raise interest rates. Once Carola has a picture of the pressures on central banks all over the world during this period. She looks at whether they succumb to the pressure or not. Do they lower rates after someone fusses at them to lower rates? And finally, she compares their actions with price levels. Do they go up or down? And Carola finds that it is pretty clear that old intuition, the old studies are still right. When central banks succumb to political pressure, higher inflation, which is exactly what happened.

[Erica Barris]

In Turkey after President Erdogan took power in 2014.

[Carola Binder]

He had this really unconventional view that he would talk about a lot, which was that lower interest rates would reduce inflation. So that's exactly the opposite of the models that most macroeconomists and central bankers use, which of course prescribes raising interest rates to reduce inflation.

[Erica Barris]

Turkey's president wanted its central bank to cut rates. So whenever a central banker didn't cooperate, he fired them and hired who he wanted. And for a while there, there was a new one just about every year and frequent turnover.

[Mary Childs]

In the canonical economic literature of central bank independence, that's a pretty big tell that things are not going so great right now. Kerala also found another tell, consolidation of executive power, which Erdogan also did in 2017. In Kerala's data reported, political pressure is less likely in a parliamentary system where power is less concentrated, as opposed to a presidential system.

[Carola Binder]

You have one particular person in power who's able to exert that pressure more.

[Erica Barris]

One thing that all three of our central bank watchers told us, it's actually quite hard to regain independence with all its benefits once you lose it. Here's Carolina, who looked at the laws over decades.

[Carolina Garriga]

Building institutions takes decades, but destroying institutions take very little time. And in the case of central banks, you need markets to believe that this institution is going to withhold political pressure. So once you show the institution is unable or that the rules are unable to control political meddling, well, the trust in the system or the long term trust in the institutions is hurt. And that takes a long time to rebuild.

[Erica Barris]

One of the few big examples is actually here in the US regular Planet Money listeners will recall President Nixon pressured the Fed to lower interest rates in the 1970s. Inflation. Inflation began and it took years and a lot of economic pain for the Fed to regain credibility. It wasn't until Fed Chair Paul Volcker finally jacked up interest rates to almost.

[Mary Childs]

20%, which illustrates something else Carola found. The more reports of central bank pressure and political interference, the longer the subsequent inflation sticks around because of that erosion of credibility.

[Erica Barris]

And like right now in the US With President Trump pressuring our central bank, he's always posting going after Jerome Powell about interest rates and he's accused Fed Governor Lisa Cook of mortgage fraud and is trying to remove her from her post.

[Mary Childs]

Lisa Cook has sued him saying he has no cause to do that. The case will work its way through the courts and that will determine a lot, enough that it may make Lev open back up his color coded spreadsheet.

[Lev Menand]

We have the United States scored as having independence with respect to the members of the Board of Governors from the President for removal because we have it scored as a protected term in office. But if courts were to determine that for cause doesn't really mean anything, then we maybe don't have this scored right.

[Mary Childs]

Lev and Carola and Carolina, their eyes are wide open right now and they are scribbling away on their little notepads.

[Erica Barris]

If you want to dive deeper into the world of central banks, check out our show notes the Federal Reserve. We have covered it a lot like the Fed's origin stories and about Trump's efforts to remove Lisa Cook from her post. Those episodes and many more are in.

[Mary Childs]

The show notes this episode was produced by Willa Rubin with production help from Sam Yellow Horse Kessler. It was edited by Marianne McCune and fact checked by Sierra Juarez, engineering by Robert Rodriguez and Maggie Luthar. Alex Goldmark is our Executive producer. Special thanks to Charlie Kyer, John Kelsey, and to whyyy. I'm Mary Childs.

[Erica Barris]

And I'm Erica Barris. This is npr. Thanks for listening.

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