We're continuing to follow President Donald Trump's campaign against U.S. central bank independence. His move to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook over unproven allegations of mortgage fraud has now been challenged by a lawsuit from Cook.

Trump wants to remove Cook, reshape the Fed to lower borrowing costs, and stimulate the economy. But Fed independence has been a strength of the U.S. financial system. What happens if that goes away?

For a lesson on that, we can turn to other countries where we've seen central bank independence erode. This includes Hungary. The BBC's Central Europe correspondent Nick Thorpe spoke with “Marketplace Morning Report” host David Brancaccio. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

David Brancaccio: President Trump's, we could say, favorite European leader, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary, has been — I think — a laboratory for a kind of MAGA-style populism. It has its differences; it has its similarities. I want to ask you, when does it become clear that Viktor Orbán wants to influence, if not control, the central bank in Hungary?

Nick Thorpe: I think 2010 is a useful date to begin with, David. That's when Viktor Orbán returned with a two-thirds majority, a massive landslide victory, which gave him really the power to do what he wanted to do. He put in his friend, György Matolcsy, there to deal with the economy, to steer it, to use it, really, as a political mode, to increase his own power, until this year.

Brancaccio: Now, in terms of how the economy has responded to some of these changes, it's been a — shall we say — uneven record. A lot of inflation there, in some of those years; a cap on interest rates, which certainly sidelines the central bank in terms of its biggest policy tool.

Thorpe: It has been up and down, though there have been also boom years. For example, from 2014 probably to 2019, the central bank, they pushed through measures which seemed risky at the time, but which paid off, really. One of the biggest ones of those was to weaken the Hungarian forint, which, of course, increased the value of Hungary's foreign currency reserves. And so suddenly there was a lot of money, and a lot of that money sort of went to the immediate kind of court of Viktor Orbán.

Brancaccio: Forint, of course, is the national currency of Hungary. Now, we’re drawing parallels between Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán of Hungary. But you worry that we shouldn't paint those comparisons with such a broad brush. There are also differences between the type of populism that you see in Hungary and what the United States is seeing with Donald Trump's base.

Thorpe: Interestingly, you know, laws were passed in 2024, for example, to rein in the independence of the Hungarian National Bank, because it had been run by Mr. Orbán’s ally as a sort of private fiefdom by his man, György Matolcsy. But Matolcsy himself came to get into more and more conflict with Mr. Orbán, so he had to go. So here we have a situation in Hungary where, in a way, Mr. Orbán was happy for it to have an independent-minded central bank doing policy, so long as those policy interests were chiming with his own.

Brancaccio: I see these economic growth forecasts. When you subtract inflation, real growth, it's not rip-roaring, as we Americans would say. I mean, I've seen between 0.8% and 1.8%.

Thorpe: This is really because the Hungarian economy is very vulnerable. It's a very open economy, and this is a big contrast, I guess, with the United States economy. Hungary’s really, this government's really, thrown all its eggs into the Chinese battery production market. Hungary is really gambling on the electric vehicles. And some more kind of cautious economic voices are saying, “Wait a minute, we don't even know how popular electric vehicles are going to be in a few years’ time.”