The shift followed attacks on the Fed by President Donald Trump for not doing more to bolster the economy and Tuesday's report by Bloomberg News that the president asked White House lawyers earlier this year to explore options for demoting Powell from the chairmanship.

Asked about the criticism, Powell said he thinks "the law is clear that I have a four-year term and I fully intend to serve it."

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As a first step toward achieving the "decentralized" part, the protocol has been turned over to a new organization, the Libra Association, whose members will hold separate tokens allowing them on-chain voting rights to govern decisions about Libra.

"Over time, it's designed to transition the node membership from these founding members who have a stake in the creation of the ecosystem to people who hold Libra and have a stake in the ecosystem as a whole," Ben Maurer, Facebook's blockchain technical lead, told CoinDesk in an exclusive interview.

In short, Libra is designed to be a high throughput, global blockchain, one that's built with programmable money in mind but limits how much users can do initially as it evolves from prototype to a robust ecosystem.

Increasing the supply of urban housing would help to address a number of the problems plaguing the United States. Construction could increase economic growth and create blue-collar jobs. Allowing more people to live in cities could mitigate inequality and reduce carbon emissions. Yet in most places, housing construction remains wildly unpopular. People who think of themselves as progressives, environmentalists and egalitarians fight fiercely against urban development, complaining about traffic and shadows and the sanctity of lawns.

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What went right in Minneapolis? The story begins with a crop of young politicians who want more housing: The city is conducting an early experiment in government by and for millennials. For the first time in the city's modern history, more than half of its residents are renters, including Mayor Frey. Many residents -- again, younger people in particular -- also describe density as a necessary response to climate change. Environmentalism, which began as an effort to protect people from cities, is increasingly embracing cities as the best way to protect the planet from people.

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All of this deserves wide emulation by other American cities. But Minneapolis has an important advantage: Its housing prices still are relatively modest, so its population includes a lot of middle-class families. Housing debates in coastal cities pit the wealthy against the poor, and middle ground has been hard to find.

Such skepticism comes in stark contrast to the confidence exuded by the likes of venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya. An early Facebook stakeholder and investing presence across several industries, Palihapitiya told CNBC at the time that entities like the Fed have used tools like quantitative easing to orchestrate a pacified economy.

"I don't see a world in which we have any form of meaningful contraction nor any form of meaningful expansion," he told CNBC in April. "We have completely taken away the toolkit of how normal economies should work when we started with QE. I mean, the odds that there's a recession anymore in any Western country of the world is almost next to impossible now, save a complete financial externality that we can't forecast."

The report went on to tell people that they needed to save their own money for retirement because the pension fund wouldn't be able to make ends meet.

This terrified a lot of Japanese workers and pensioners.

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Prime Minister Shinzo Abe apologized for the report, calling it "inaccurate and misleading."

And Finance Minister Taro Aso-- himself a pensioner at age 78 (though in typical Japanese form he looks like he's 45)-- simply un-published the report.

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But President Trump and Mr. Son had made a giant miscalculation, one the business press also missed. They forgot about the states.

This week, nine states and the District of Columbia, led by New York's attorney general, Letitia James, filed suit in federal court in New York to block the merger... if the states win in court, as they seem likely to, the merger is dead. Inadvertently, this corporate blunder has created a new role for the states in merger review: acting as a backstop in cases of gross dereliction of duty by the federal government.

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Companies tend to act in their financial self-interest, and where there is less competition, they feel much less need to invest money to keep customers (ask your local cable company). And internal documents, referred to in a partly redacted complaint filed as part of the lawsuit, appear to confirm that the carriers saw the merger less as an opportunity to do battle with China (always an unclear mission for a domestic phone company) but rather as an opportunity to raise prices. The companies' own economists predict the merger will cost subscribers at least $4.5 billion a year.

The ratio of corporate borrowing to a variety of metrics -- profits and assets, book value or the size of the overall economy -- is at or near an all-time high. So is the riskiness of the loans, reflecting the amount of debt companies have taken on, the absence of covenants and the rosy assumptions made about the amount of cash flow companies will have to cover debt service.

Meanwhile, the difference in interest rates between the safest loans and the riskiest -- in financial jargon, the "spread" -- is at historically low levels, a reliable indication of too much money chasing too few good lending opportunities. According to the latest "financial stability" reports from the Federal Reserve and the International Monetary Fund, all of these measures have gotten worse in the last two years, with many flashing yellow and red on their dashboards of systemic financial risk.

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If all this newly borrowed money were being used to create new technology or enhance productivity, piling up all this debt might be a risk worth taking. But the evidence suggests that what it is mostly doing is artificially stimulating the economy. Companies have used much of this newly borrowed money to buy back their own shares, pay special dividends to private equity investors and acquire other companies, all of which have the effect of inflating stock prices. The recent wave of richly priced mergers and overpriced stock offerings, and the declining returns offered by recent commercial real estate deals, are all good indications of a credit bubble waiting to burst.

So, is this a replay of 2008?

... as before, this excess of supply relative to demand has led to a deterioration of lending standards that started in the shadow banking system and has now spread to regulated banks anxious about a further reduction in their market share. (My favorite stat: During the first three months of this year, according to Trepp, a data company, interest-only loans -- loans requiring no payback of principal until the loan is due -- accounted for three-quarters of all new commercial real estate loans.)

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Perhaps the biggest similarity between the previous credit bubble and this one, however, is the stubborn reluctance of regulators to let some of the air out of the credit bubble before it bursts.

... The [Financial Stability Oversight] Council is headed by Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs investment banker who eventually made more than $10 million buying and selling -- with partners -- a California bank that, after engaging in aggressive mortgage lending, failed during the last housing crisis.

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Powell, Quarles and Mnuchin are overconfident for the same reason Fed chairmen Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson were overconfident during the Bush years.

The vote, which would be the GOP's most dramatic act of defiance since Trump took office, could also have the effect of blocking billions of dollars in border wall funding that the president had announced in February when he declared a national emergency at the southern border, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the talks are private.

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Trump's plans to impose tariffs on Mexico -- with which the United States has a free-trade agreement -- rely on the president's declaration of a national emergency at the border... Congress passed [a blocking] resolution in March after Trump reallocated the border wall funds, but he vetoed it. Now, as frustration on Capitol Hill grows over Trump's latest tariff threat, a second vote could potentially command a veto-proof majority to nullify the national emergency, which in turn could undercut both the border-wall effort and the new tariffs.

Cruise travel from the U.S. to Cuba began in May 2016 during President Barack Obama's opening with the island. It has become the most popular form of U.S. leisure travel to the island, bringing 142,721 people in the first four months of the year, a more than 300% increase over the same period last year. For travelers confused about the thicket of federal regulations governing travel to Cuba, cruises offered a simple, one-stop, guaranteed-legal way to travel.

That now appears to be over.

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Collin Laverty, head of Cuba Educational Travel, one of the largest Cuba travel companies in the U.S., called the new measures "political grandstanding aimed at Florida in the run up to the 2020 elections."