Trump's hypocritical war on savers
When Barack Obama was president, Donald Trump lacerated the Federal Reserve for keeping interest rates low and said Fed policy was crushing savers. Not that’s he’s president, Trump is pushing hard for lower rates himself, with none of the concern for savers he expressed as a 2016 candidate and Obama critic.
For more than a year, Trump has been attacking the Fed for raising rates and hectoring the central bank to reverse course. He finally got his wish in July, when the Fed cut rates by a quarter-point, the first rate cut since 2008. Some interest rates have fallen further since then due to a selloff in stocks and concerns about a global economic slowdown. Mortgage rates, for instance, have fallen back to 2016 levels, after rising for most of the last three years. Savings rates have fallen, too.
This would have been terrible news to the 2016 Trump. “The people hurt the worst are people that saved their money all their lives and thought they would live off their interest,” candidate Trump told CNBC on Sept. 12, 2016. “Those people are getting just absolutely creamed.” Trump said Janet Yellen, who was Fed chair at the time, should be “ashamed of herself” for keeping rates so low. “She’s obviously political and doing what Obama wants her to do,” Trump griped.
The 2019 Trump is infuriated for exactly the opposite reason: The current Fed chair, Jay Powell, won’t politicize the Fed and cut rates as deeply as Trump wants him to. More than that, Trump wants the Fed to expand its own mission and weaken the U.S. dollar, in order to boost exports and give Trump a tactical edge in his poorly managed trade war with China. That would be an unprecedented power grab by the world’s most powerful financial authority, whose Congressionally mandated job is to optimize inflation and unemployment, and nothing more.
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https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trumps-hypocritical-war-on-savers-182243251.html
