(Reuters) – U.S President Donald Trump said on Thursday that Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell’s termination “cannot come fast enough”, while calling for the U.S. central bank to cut interest rates.
Trump, in a post on his social media platform Truth Social, reiterated his stance on rate cuts, saying that Powell “should have lowered interest rates, like the (European Central Bank), long ago, but he should certainly lower them now.”
The Fed’s benchmark interest rate is currently 4.25%-4.50%, where it has been since December following several rate cuts late last year.
Trump’s comments come a day after Powell said at an event at the Economic Club of Chicago that the Fed’s “independence is very widely understood and supported in Washington and in Congress where it really matters.”
Trump in his post said Powell was “always too late and wrong”, and critiqued the speech Powell made on Wednesday, calling it “another, and typical, complete mess!”
Powell, who on Wednesday spoke for the first time since Trump paused some tariffs, also characterized the ongoing market volatility of recent weeks as a logical processing of the Trump administration’s dramatic shifts in trade policy – not a sign of stress that warranted a Fed response.
Powell warned Trump’s tariff policies risked pushing inflation and employment further from the central bank’s goals and said the Fed was “well positioned to wait for greater clarity”.
(Reporting by Angela Christy and Gursimran Kaur in Bengaluru; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)
Comments