Powell speaking at the Economic Club of Chicago in Chicago. — AFP
WASHINGTON: White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett says President Donald Trump and his team are continuing to study if they could fire US Federal Reserve (Fed) chair Jerome Powell, a sign that such a move, a matter of great consequence for the central bank’s independence and for global markets, is still an option.
“The president and his team will continue to study that matter,” Hassett said at the White House when a reporter asked if “firing Jay Powell is an option in a way that it wasn’t before”.
Hassett’s remarks came a day after Trump ramped up a long-simmering feud with the Fed chair, accusing Powell of “playing politics” by not cutting interest rates and asserting he had the power to evict Powell from his job “real fast”.
Trump doubled down on his criticism of Powell last Friday, telling reporters during an Oval Office event: “If we had a Fed chairman that understood what he was doing, interest rates would be coming down. He should bring them down.”
Hassett appeared to distance himself from a 2021 book in which he argued that firing Powell during Trump’s first term would have harmed the reputation of the Fed as an objective and independent manager of the US money supply, potentially compromising the credibility of the US dollar and crashing the stock market.
“I think that at that time, the market was a completely different place. And, you know, I was referring to legal analysis that we had back then. And if there’s new legal analysis that says something different, then we need to rethink our response,” Hassett said.
It was not immediately clear what new legal analysis he was referencing, but a case over whether Trump overstepped his authority in firing two Democrats from federal labour boards now pending at the Supreme Court is being closely watched as a potential precedent for whether Trump could remove Powell.
Powell has said that the law would not allow his removal, that he would not leave if asked to by Trump, and that he intends to serve through the end of his term as chair in May 2026.
Powell, whose term as a member of the Fed’s Board of Governors extends through January 2028, also said last week he does not think the current case on appeal at the US high court will apply to the Fed.
Powell, first appointed to the Fed by President Barack Obama, was elevated to Fed chair by Trump during his first term, but the Republican president soon soured on him for raising interest rates.
Trump repeatedly berated Powell in public and considered trying to fire him but never did.
The issue has arisen again in the last week with Powell and other Fed officials saying they believe Trump’s aggressive tariffs could put them in a bind with the potential for them to push up inflation while harming overall economic growth and labour markets.
Trump chastised Powell again last Thursday for not cutting rates.
“The Fed really owes it to the American people to get interest rates down. That’s the only thing he’s good for,” Trump said. “I am not happy with him. If I want him out of there he’ll be out real fast believe me.”
The Fed, after a series of rate cuts late last year, has left its benchmark policy rate on hold in the range of 4.25% to 4.50% since December.
Powell last week signalled that with uncertainty elevated about what effects will arise from the tariffs and other administration policies, he and his colleagues are in no rush to change their wait-and-see posture.
Hassett said he was focused on the Fed’s policy actions, not the personalities, and took issue with the central bank’s decision to raise interest rates during Trump’s first term and to characterise tax cuts as inflationary, but to not take issue with “runaway spending” by former President Joe Biden, which Hassett said was “textbook inflationary”.
“And so if you think that it’s unacceptable for President Trump to be frustrated with the policy history of the Fed, then I think that you’ve got some explaining to do,” he said.
Hassett said Trump’s policies were boosting capital spending and job creation was increasing, while inflation was declining.
“And so against that backdrop to have everybody who refused to warn about the runaway spending, you know, out there saying, ‘Oh, this is going to be a catastrophe for inflation because of tariffs,’ means that people need to, like, improve their models and improve their messaging.”
Economists and investors have been following the escalation with trepidation.
The Fed’s credibility as the world’s most powerful central bank rests largely on its historic independence to act free from political influence, and an effort to remove Powell could further roil markets already battered for weeks by Trump’s erratic approach to imposing his new tariffs, with the rollout beset by a mix of delays, partial rollbacks and escalations, with China in particular.
“A sudden crystallisation of the threat to Fed independence would both intensify market stress and shift it in more of a stagflationary direction with a sharp increase in tail risk,” Evercore ISI vice-chair Krishna Guha said in a note. — Reuters
