President Donald Trump wants Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell to lower interest rates to help America cut the costs of its massive debt after years of former President Joe Biden’s spending levels.
And, mocking his first administration Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin for advising him to make Powell his Fed Chair, Trump joked he could do a much better job because Powell is “stupid” and “too late” on cutting interest rates that were raised to deal with Biden inflation that Trump has hailed having wiped out.
“Maybe I should go to the Fed. Am I allowed to appoint myself?” Trump said outside the White House as a flag pole installation ceremony. “I’d do a much better job.”
Powell was expected to decide later Wednesday not to lower interest rates.
“Powell’s too late,” Trump said.
“I know what I’m doing. So we have a stupid person, frankly, at the Fed. He probably won’t cut today. Europe had 10 cuts and we had none.
“And I guess he’s a political guy, I don’t know. He’s a political guy who’s not a smart person, but he’s costing the country a fortune.
“So what I’m going to do is, you know, he gets out in about nine months. He has to. He gets, fortunately, terminated.”
Trump admitted he made a mistake listening to Mnuchin on making Powell the Fed chair in the first place.
“I would have never reappointed him,” Trump continued. “Biden reappointed him. I don’t know why that is, but I guess maybe he was a Democrat.
“You know, I got great advice from Mnuchin on this one – great advice – but he’s done a poor job.”
Trump noted there is no reason for higher interest rates because his administration has wiped out the Biden-era record-high inflation.
“So we have no inflation,” Trump said. “We have only success. And I’d like to see interest rates get down now.”
Lowering the rates would save America nearly $1 trillion on interest on U.S. debt, according to Trump.
“It would be nice to be 2½ points lower: We’d be saving $800 billion, %700 billion,” Trump said. “That’s a lot of money, think of it, for nothing – for absolutely nothing.
“We’d save $6- $7, $800 billion. We have, I think we’re 38th now in interest. And we should be No. 1. We should be the lowest.”
Trump noted the Fed has the power to manipulate rates periodically anyway, so with no inflation now, you could lower rates and just raise them back up if inflation were to return.
“If he’s worried about inflation, that’s OK, I understand that,” Trump said. “I don’t think there’s going to be any – so far there hasn’t – I mean we have almost no inflation.
“We’ve done a great job. We had when I came in we had a lot of inflation. We went through four years of the highest inflation in the history of our country with Sleepy Joe Biden. And Sleepy Joe, he didn’t know what the hell he was doing.
“And so we had the highest inflation we’ve ever had in the history of our country. And then it came down because when I got elected, it started dropping because people understood that knew what I was doing.
“But now we have a man that just refuses to lower the fed rate, just refuses to do it. And he’s not a smart person.”
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