Fed Chair Jerome Powell To Donald Trump: Bring It, Bitch.
At least that's how we translated his statement.
There are so many different things one could classify as the bane of Donald Trump’s existence. Laws, for one. Democrats, for another. Stairs, if you need a third.
If you need a fourth, there is Jerome Powell. Trump has been after the chairman of the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates for a year. Trump has berated Powell on camera, in person, in posts on Truth Social, and who knows, possibly calling Powell from atop his golden shitter to yell at him while the Secret Service bangs on the door and yells, Sir, what are those horrific noises, are you in need of medical assistance?
Last April we wrote that the best course of action for Trump was to just grit his teeth until Powell’s term ends in May of 2026. Then he can nominate whatever lickspittle he likes, and the Republicans in the Senate would likely go along with it because they are spineless cretins.
A lot has happened since then regarding the debate over the president’s power to fire independent regulators, the bottom line of which is that the Supreme Court ruled that a president can get rid of them based on his own whims, with the exception of the Fed chair, because the Fed is a special case. The special case being that the world’s economy really depends on America maintaining a central bank free of political pressure that could be used to hurt other nations. Even the SCOTUS justices don’t want to see their retirement funds go up in smoke.
Trump buddy Viktor Orbán politicized Hungary’s central bank by installing his cronies. The result was that inflation in the country went from 10 percent to 86 percent in two years. If that happened here, Democrats might very well win 400 House seats in the midterms.
So, Trump’s administration has come up with the next best thing: a sham criminal investigation! It’s a tried-and-true tactic for the Trump team, which will not let a little thing like the fact that their other sham criminal investigations keep getting thrown out of court accompanied by written opinions absolutely disemboweling the prosecutors for wasting time filing charges deter them. Ask Letitia James’s hairdresser about this.
The charges are ostensibly related to the multi-year renovation of the Fed’s headquarters in Washington, which Trump and his people have alleged Powell “grossly mismanaged.” There have been accusations of massive cost overruns, of unnecessary luxuries like marble floors and private dining rooms and the like. As Doktor Zoom explained in July, it’s all a bunch of bullshit. There are various reasons why the renovation turned out to be more expensive than anticipated, one of which was post-pandemic inflation and supply-chain issues, which would have been avoided if Trump had managed the fucking virus properly in the first place.
Still, finally America gets the criminal investigation into a massive federal building project with unnecessary luxuries and beset by corruption that it so richly deserves! Unfortunately, the project is not the White House ballroom, the size of which has now gotten so massive that there is talk about making other parts of the White House bigger just for symmetry.
Sunday night, Powell released a video announcing that he had been served with a grand jury subpoena on Friday. He then proceeded to state baldly what everyone and their cat knows, which is that these charges are trumped-up bullshit aimed at punishing Powell for not falling to his knees in supplication and doing Trump’s bidding:
“The threat of criminal charges is a consequence of the Federal Reserve setting interest rates based on our best assessment of what will serve the public, rather than following the preferences of the president. This is about whether the Fed will be able to continue to set interest rates based on evidence and economic conditions, or whether instead, monetary policy will be directed by political pressure or intimidation.”
Thus did Jerome Powell, the serious and colorless economist who probably last smiled about something around 1983, show more backbone in fighting the Trump administration than we have seen over the last year from countless major law firms, business leaders, university presidents, journalists, and Congress.
This is such a typical Trump move, though he denies knowing anything about it. (And if you believe that, we have some bonds we’d like to float you at 10 percent interest.) He only needed to wait four months, and then Powell is gone from the chairmanship, and likely off the Board altogether if he follows in the footsteps of past chairs and retires. But in typical fashion, revenge and bullying are more important.
Even Republicans aren’t buying it. Thom Tillis of North Carolina announced he would block any Trump nominee for the Fed, including whoever is named as Powell’s potential replacement. Lisa Murkowski agreed in a fairly strident statement. Even Roger Marshall of Kansas, who can usually be counted on to toe the dumbest lines from the White House, told Maria Bartiromo the government has bigger issues to deal with.
Speaking of Bartiromo, you know Trump must be doing something wrong when even she sounds skeptical of it, as she did when she interviewed Trump adviser and sentient frying pan Peter Navarro on Monday morning:
The entire Navarro segment is here if you hate yourself enough to listen to the most weaselly Keebler elf in the forest ramble unintelligibly for 10 minutes.
If there is a silver lining here, it is that markets are so used to Trump’s tantrums that the chaos is baked into investors’ assessments. So the Dow Jones hardly gets roiled by what would be an extinction-level event under other presidents, most of whom were not insane dumbasses when it came to fiscal policy and the independence of the Fed. In fact, the Dow was actually up slightly by midday on Monday.
So possibly the world financial system will dodge yet another bullet, not because of America’s slop-brained idiot of a president, but in spite of him. We’re going to be saying that a lot for the next three years.
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Spent all day making gumbo and drinking mezcal. Life is good.
I like Powell. From what I hear from people who know way more about econ than me, he's a capable choice if not the best one.
But this motherfucker is not intimidated by Trump. Trump comes after him, this man grabs a box cutter and gives no shit.
If Democrats were worth anything they'd take notes.