Trump, in a Hand-Scrawled Note to Jerome Powell, Demands That Fed Chairman Cut Rates ‘a Lot’

The president is ramping up his pressure on the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, to cut interest rates. On Monday, the White House shared a copy of a message the president had printed out and scribbled on with a Sharpie demanding that Mr. Powell cut interest rates “by a lot.”Mr. Trump and his allies in Congress have been criticizing Mr. Powell for weeks for his refusal to cut rates at recent meeting of the Fed’s Board of Governors. On Sunday, the president called Mr. Powell “stupid” and a “bad” person. Speaking to reporters at the White House briefing on Monday, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt shared Mr. Trump’s message to Mr. Powell with the assembled press. The screed was written on a list of other countries’ interest rates. “Jerome — You are, as usual, ‘Too Late.’ You have cost the USA a fortune and continue to do so. You should lower the rate — By a lot!” the president wrote in his message over the chart of foreign interest rates. “Hundreds of billions of dollars are being lost! No inflation!”Ms. Leavitt claimed that the “one problem” Americans now face is the rate being held steady by the Fed.“As the president has consistently stated, the American economy is booming,” Ms. Leavitt said Monday. “The one problem that remains is high interest rates for the American people. The American people want to borrow money cheaply and they should be able to do that, but unfortunately, we have interest rates that are still too high.”Mr. Powell has faced similar criticism from Republicans on Capitol Hill. When he testified before the House Financial Services Committee last week, several lawmakers asked him why he refused to cut rates in June, when the economic picture looked similar to the outlook in September last year before the election — when he cut rates by 50 basis points. “There’s no recession. That’s been established. There’s no hyperinflation or certainly not as [high] as what some had been projecting, yet there seems to be higher than expected … interest rates,” one lawmaker, Congressman Bill Huizenga, said to Mr. Powell last week. “So, what is it that’s keeping, in your mind, the Fed from … [lowering] interest rates?”“Why aren’t we doing what the rest of the world is doing?” Mr. Huizenga added. The Fed chairman said only that the “forecast” shows a “meaningful increase in inflation” over the course of this year, considering the implementation of the president’s tariffs. Mr. Powell has said he’s more than happy to cut rates, but he can’t make that assessment until he gets closer to the next Fed meeting as he compiles more data. In a boon for the president, Goldman Sachs is now predicting a rate cut in September, as well as a 75-basis-point cut by the end of the year. “While it is far from clear, we think the odds of a cut in September are somewhat above 50 percent because we see several routes to get there — underwhelming tariff effects, larger disinflationary offsets, and either genuine labor market softness or a scare from month-to-month volatility,” the bank’s economics team said Monday, according to a report from Bloomberg.

Trump, in a Hand-Scrawled Note to Jerome Powell, Demands That Fed Chairman Cut Rates ‘a Lot’

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