White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett said on Friday President Donald Trump and his team were studying the matter when asked if firing Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell was an option, an indication that a matter of great consequence for the central bank’s independence and for global markets remained under active consideration by the White House.
“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 exchange with the press 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 on 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 his 2021 book The Drift: Stopping America’s Slide to Socialism, 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 nation’s money supply and could have compromised the credibility of the dollar and crashed 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.
