Since retiring two years ago, Joan Harris has upped her travel game.

Once or twice a year, she visits her two adult children in different states. She’s planning multiple other trips, including to a science fiction convention in Scotland and a Disney cruise soon after that, along with a trip next year to neolithic sites in Great Britain.

“I really have more money to spend now than when I was working,” said Harris, 64, an engineer who worked 29 years for the federal government and lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Right-wing allies of former U.S. President Donald Trump are reportedly crafting a plan to give the executive branch control over Federal Reserve policy decisions, an effort that comes as the presumptive GOP nominee continues to signal his authoritarian intentions for a potential second term.

Donald Trump’s allies are quietly drafting proposals that would attempt to erode the Federal Reserve’s independence if the former president wins a second term, in the midst of a deepening divide among his advisers over how aggressively to challenge the central bank’s authority.

With the economy humming along and the stock market, despite some recent twists and turns, hanging in there pretty well, it’s a tough case to sell that higher interest rates are having a substantially negative impact on the economy.

So what if policymakers just decide to keep rates where they are for even longer, and go through all of 2024 without cutting?

It’s a question that, despite the current conditions, makes Wall Street shudder and Main Street queasy as well.

America seemed headed for an economic fairy-tale ending in late 2023. The painfully rapid inflation that had kicked off in 2021 appeared to be cooling in earnest, and economic growth had begun to gradually moderate after a series of Federal Reserve interest rate increases.

But 2024 has brought a spate of surprises: The economy is expanding rapidly, job gains are unexpectedly strong and progress on inflation shows signs of stalling. That could add up to a very different conclusion.

Another firmer-than-anticipated inflation report delivered a meaningful setback Wednesday to the Federal Reserve’s hope that it could buoy prospects of a so-called soft landing by dialing back some of the past year’s interest-rate increases.

Solid hiring and the prospect that inflation might settle out closer to 3% than the Fed’s 2% goal could call into question whether the central bank will be able to cut rates until much later in the year without evidence of a sharper slowdown in the economy.