Trump says he ‘made’ Fed chair, but now wants to trade him in
In an interview on the Fox Business Network, Trump said Wednesday “we should have Draghi” instead of Powell because of Draghi’s announcement last week that he was prepared to provide more stimulus if necessary to support the lagging European economy.
Trump said that in contrast, Powell was “sucking (money) like from a vacuum cleaner,” a reference to the Fed’s efforts to lower its holdings of Treasury bonds.
The president said of Powell, “Here’s a guy nobody ever heard of him before and now, I made him and he wants to show how tough he is.”
Trump selected Powell to be Fed chairman after deciding not to nominate Janet Yellen for a second four-year term. Powell, a Republican, had been nominated to the Fed’s seven-member board by Barack Obama,
Powell took over as chairman in February 2018. As the Fed kept raising interest rates last year, Trump increased his criticism of the central bank and Powell. Trump has complained that last year’s four rate hikes sent the stock market into a nose-dive in December as investors feared the Fed’s tightening could push the country into a recession.
The Fed switched course in January and declared it was prepared to be “patient” before changing rates again, a move that bolstered the stock market until rising trade tensions between the United States and China again raised recession fears last month.
Last week, the Fed left rates unchanged and signaled that it was prepared to begin cutting rates if needed to protect the economy from trade battles and other risks.
Trump’s latest Fed attack came a day after Powell made his most extensive comments on the Fed’s need for political independence to do its job.
Asked about the repeated criticism by Trump, Powell said, “We are human. We make mistakes. I hope not frequently but we will make mistakes. But we won’t make mistakes of integrity or character.”
Powell said that the Fed’s independence from direct political control had served the country well and when central banks do not have that protection “you see bad things happening.”
During the Fox Business Network interview, Trump also complained again about supposed bias against conservatives at social media companies and said the U.S. government should sue Google and Facebook Inc. for unspecified wrongdoing.
Trump said social media companies are run by Democrats and that Twitter has somehow made it difficult for people to follow his @realDonaldTrump account, from which he tweets prolifically.
Twitter said that followers of high-profile accounts may have been deleted as part of an effort to remove fake, abusive and malicious accounts.
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