Trump blasts Powell as ‘political’ as Fed weighs rate cuts

Former President Trump accused Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell of being “political” and suggested the lifelong Republican would consider cutting rates to help Democrats during the 2024 election.

“I think he’s going to do something to probably help the Democrats, I think, if he lowers interest rates,” Trump said in an interview on Fox News Business Network’s “Mornings with Maria” that will air Sunday.

“It looks to me like he’s trying to lower interest rates for the sake of maybe getting people elected, I don’t know,” he added.

When asked if he would reappoint Powell if he won the election in November, Trump said, “No, I wouldn’t do that.”

Trump appointed Powell as Fed chair in 2017 but quickly soured on him. The former president put unprecedented public pressure on Powell to cut interest rates in order to boost the stock market and improve his leverage in trade battles with China and the European Union.

Trump regularly criticized Powell during his presidency, even threatening to fire him and questioning whether Chinese President Xi Jinping was kinder to the U.S. than Powell was.

But Powell refused to align the Fed, an independent agency legally mandated to balance unemployment and inflation, behind Trump’s political whims.

The ordeal upped Powell’s bipartisan credibility, as did his handling of the onset of the pandemic, leading President Biden to reappoint Powell, over the objection of many progressives.

Biden and Trump, who is the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, have already begun sparring over the state of the economy amid its surprising rebound.

The central bank has signaled it is considering interest rate cuts later this year amid falling inflation and surprisingly resilient jobs and gross domestic product (GDP) growth.

Some Senate Democrats also urged Powell to cut rates ahead of the Fed’s meeting Wednesday, arguing high rates have “aggravated the country’s persistent crisis of housing access and affordability.”

“As the Fed weighs its next steps in the new year, we urge you to consider the effects of your interest rate decisions on the housing market and to reverse the troubling rate hikes that have put affordable housing out of reach for too many,” Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.), Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) wrote in a Sunday letter to Powell.

The Fed announced it would pause interest rates again Wednesday, and Powell indicated the central bank was not likely to cut rates in March at a news conference following the announcement.

“We want to see more good data. It’s not that we’re looking for better data,” Powell said. “We need to see more evidence that sort of confirms what we think we’re seeing.”

The January jobs report blew past expectations, with 353,000 jobs added to the economy and the unemployment rate remaining low at 3.7 percent, according to data from the Labor Department released Friday.