Jailed former White House economic adviser Peter Navarro predicted Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell would get the boot in a second Trump administration.
“My guess is that this punctilious non-economist will be gone in a hundred days one way or the other,” Navarro said in an interview with Semafor, published Tuesday.
Navarro name-checked Kevin Hassett and Tyler Goodspeed, both ex-chairs of the Council of Economic Advisers under former President Trump, as potential replacements.
The Semafor interview was conducted from a federal prison where Navarro is serving a four-month sentence for failing to comply with a congressional subpoena issued by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
Navarro, who served as director of Trump’s Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, wrote out his responses to the interview questions in an email from the prison’s law library, Semafor noted.
He criticized Powell’s approach to dealing with inflation.
“Powell was Mnuchin’s folly,” Navarro said, referring to Trump’s former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. “Powell raised rates too fast under Trump and choked off growth. To keep his job, Powell then raised rates too slowly to contain inflation under Biden.”
Trump, the presumptive GOP candidate for president, has previously said he would not reappoint Powell to lead the Fed.
“I would not reappoint him. I thought he was always late, whether it was good or bad, but he was always late,” Trump said in an August 2023 interview with Fox Business Network’s Larry Kudlow, who served as a top economic official in the Trump White House.
Trump, who first nominated Powell to lead the central bank in 2018, soured on the chair late in his first term as Powell and the Federal Reserve hiked interest rates.
President Biden nominated Powell for a second four-year term in November 2021, and he was confirmed by the Senate in May 2022 by a vote of 80-19. His current term expires in 2026.
“I was surprised he was reappointed. Probably he got reappointed because they knew I didn’t like him much,” Trump said in the Fox Business interview last August. “I’m not a fan of Jay Powell.”