Former President Donald Trump is reminding Americans that he doesn’t much care for Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, the central banker he appointed in 2017. It’s actually quite a bit worse than that.
This time, Trump accused Powell of being “political” and working to help President Joe Biden with his reelection.
“I think he’s going to do something to probably help the Democrats,” Trump told Fox Business Network, according to clips from an interview with Maria Bartiromo that will air Sunday, commenting on reports that Powell is considering lowering interest rates in a few months’ time. When Trump was president, he violated the norm of central bank independence from the White House by repeatedly pressuring Powell to do exactly that, lower interest rates—and Powell obliged, resulting in a surprise for economists when inflation didn’t take off.
As Trump told Bartiromo, “It looks to me like he’s trying to lower interest rates for the sake of maybe getting people elected, I don’t know.”
Since appointing Powell, Trump has regularly expressed his disapproval of the Fed chair. Over the years Trump has been angry with Powell for lowering interest rates, raising interest rates, and keeping them steady. More recently, in May, Trump hinted at past disagreements with Powell, telling Fox News’s Sean Hannity that he had a “situation” with the chair and “beat the hell out of him,” although it’s unclear what he was referring to. While still in office Trump once called Powell and Federal Reserve staffers “boneheads” on social media for not cutting interest rates close to zero.
During his interview with Bartiromo, Trump said he wouldn’t keep Powell as Fed chair. Biden reappointed Powell to a second term in 2021. Even that decision drew accusations from Trump of being politically motivated. “Probably he got reappointed because they knew I didn’t like him much,” Trump said of Powell in an August interview.
So far, Powell has distanced himself from comments about whether he would seek a third term, especially under a possible second Trump administration. On Wednesday at a press conference following the Fed’s monthly meeting, Powell was asked whether he expected to be nominated again if Trump or another Republican were to be elected president. Powell brushed off the question.
“I don’t have a stance on that,” Powell said. “It’s not something I’m focused on. I’m focused on doing our jobs. This year is going to be a highly consequential year for the Fed and for monetary policy, and we’re, all of us, very buckled down and focused on doing our jobs.”
Biden’s ‘holy grail’ of economic growth
Trump has signaled, and at times even said outright, that he sees the strength of the current U.S. economy as a political liability. Last month, Trump said he believed the economy would crash and that he hoped it would do so in the next 12 months when Biden was still in office.
At the moment, the U.S. economy appears to have defied many of last year’s concerns that a recession was coming. Inflation is at 3.4%, down from the high of 9% in the summer of 2022. While a blockbuster jobs report on Friday showed the U.S. job market getting a blistering start to the year, adding 353,000 jobs in January. The unemployment rate remained at 3.7%, an almost 50-year low, marking a full two years where the number has been below 4%.
Powell cautioned that the famed and hoped for “soft landing,” where inflation drops while the economy grows, wasn’t a done deal yet, but that there were encouraging signs. Other experts thought the current mix of interest rate raises, declining inflation, and low unemployment was a sign the current administration had threaded the needle on economic policy.
“We are currently seeing what I’ve called the holy grail of noninflationary growth,” EY-Parthenon chief economist Gregory Daco said ahead of the report’s release on Friday. “We have an environment where the economy’s still moving forward at a relatively decent clip, and we have inflation that’s falling back toward the Fed’s target. It’s the best of both worlds when it comes to policymakers.”
There are some last corners of the consumer economy where inflation continues to linger. Packaged goods in particular have seen stubbornly high prices and so-called shrinkflation, where manufacturers reduce the size of a product—often a consumer good like shampoo or a candy bar—but keep the price the same. Biden has sought to lay the blame for high prices at grocery stores at the feet of corporations. “There are still too many corporations in America ripping people off: price gouging, junk fees, greedflation, shrinkflation,” Biden said last week during an event in South Carolina.
At the same time the stock market is on a tear, with the S&P 500 closing out 2023 near an all-time high. Although a sputtering start to 2024 has investors feeling jittery. During Biden’s first three years in office, the S&P 500 rose about 23%. In the past few weeks, though, Trump has taken to crediting himself as the reason for the stock rally. A claim he repeated to Bartiromo, who asked him why the stock market is on a roll if the economy is so bad. “Because they think I’m going to be elected,” Trump replied.
