With Trump in Power, the Fed Gets Ready for a Reckoning, by Binyamin Applebaum.

Paul A. Volcker, the Federal Reserve chairman, received an urgent warning two weeks after Ronald Reagan won the 1980 presidential election. Some of the president-elect’s advisers, he was told, wanted to abolish the central bank and replace it with a computer program that would manage interest rates and monetary policy.

Today, a Democratic Fed leader is once again bracing to see whether victorious and emboldened Republicans will try to overhaul the central bank. …

Donald J. Trump, the president-elect, has embraced criticism that the Fed is causing more problems than it is solving …

Mr. Trump can fill a majority of the Fed’s seven-member board with his own nominees over the next 18 months, including replacing Ms. Yellen in February 2018. … Or Mr. Trump could emulate Mr. Reagan and leave the central bank alone. …

Mr. Trump has described himself as “a low-interest-rate person,” reflecting his background as a real estate investor who drew heavily on other people’s money. He also has promised to deliver stronger economic growth, a goal that could be inhibited by higher interest rates. …

Many of the advisers surrounding Mr. Trump, however, have long advocated that the Fed focus on controlling inflation, even at the expense of short-term growth. They have argued that the Fed has little power to increase economic activity beyond Wall Street — and on Wall Street, they warn, the Fed is encouraging excessive speculation. …

In early September, he said the Fed was supporting a “very false economy” by driving asset prices to what he described as unsustainable heights. “We are in a big, fat, ugly bubble,” Mr. Trump said during the first presidential debate, a few weeks later.