A criminal investigation into the chairman of the Federal Reserve? Grand jury subpoenas handed out to Fed officials by agents of the U.S. Justice Department? The latest events at the Fed, revealed over the weekend by Fed Chair Jerome Powell, have no precedent and have shocked even many political veterans.

The Justice Department says the probe is related to the refurbishment of the Fed’s historic headquarters. Powell says that’s a smokescreen, and it’s really happening because he refuses to kowtow to President Donald Trump on interest rates.

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Trump, meanwhile, said Sunday night that he didn’t know anything about the Justice Department subpoenas.

Whether you’re alarmed by, enthusiastic about or just interested in this news, here are five important pieces of context.

American voters have more than 12 times as much of their savings in U.S. Treasury bonds as they do in gold and silver.

As of the end of the third quarter, U.S. households owned $3 trillion in Treasury bonds directly, plus another $1.6 trillion through traditional mutual funds and $675 billion through exchange-traded funds, for a grand total of about $4.3 trillion in Treasury exposure.

And that doesn’t even include the trillions more in municipal bonds and corporate bonds, whose prices are heavily influenced by the Treasury market.

Gold? Total assets of all North American gold exchange-traded funds, such as SPDR Gold Shares GLD and others, total $290 billion, according to the World Gold Council, a marketing organization for the gold industry. Silver funds add another $50 billion.

Physical gold — coins and bars — adds a bit more, but not much. U.S. net purchases of physical gold lately were half those of Thailand’s.

Bottom line: This move may be popular in gold and silver circles, but it risks creating many more financial losers than winners.

But financial developments have proved Powell right and the president wrong. Powell refused to cut rates until he saw evidence that inflation was slowing. And inflation remained well above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target all last year — even without big cuts to short-term interest rates.

This isn’t correct. Trump is confusing the overnight interest rate, known as the federal-funds rate, with the longer-term rates that the U.S. Treasury pays on bonds. According to the Treasury’s own data, only $6.5 trillion of the government’s $30 trillion of publicly held debt is in short-term paper known as Treasury bills, whose interest rate is very closely tied to the Fed’s short-term rates. About half the debt is in Treasury notes, with maturities up to 10 years away. And another $5 trillion is in long-term bonds with maturities of up to 30 years.

To get all these rates down to 1% would require massive so-called financial repression by the government — meaning the federal government would control rates through intervention in the bond market. The risks to inflation would be immense.

The president is also trying to get rid of Powell’s deputy Lisa Cook, and last summer he fired the economist in charge of compiling the government’s official inflation and jobs data. He initially tried to put the statistics department under the control of an economist from the Heritage Foundation, the ultraconservative think tank that created the controversial “Project 2025” program, but apparently that was too much even for Republicans in Congress.

If Trump is able to get rid of Powell and Cook and replace them with loyalists, that would give him control of the Federal Reserve board in Washington, D.C., and could open the door to a broader political purge of the nationwide Federal Reserve system. That’s because all 12 regional Federal Reserve Bank presidents need to be reconfirmed in their roles in March. That has been a formality — until now.

The latest jobs report, which came out Friday, was worse for Main Street than it was for Wall Street. It showed that the number of unemployed people has jumped by 600,000, or 9%, in a year. And, ominously for Trump, that entire increase occurred among native-born Americans.

Meanwhile, the number of Americans who were forced to work part time because of the economy jumped by 1 million, or nearly 25%.

The president had obviously reviewed the data the day before they were released, because he leaked some of the news on Thursday. Then, on the day the data were actually published, his administration sent its agents into the Fed with subpoenas.

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