Trump says Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell should ‘resign immediately'
said on Wednesday that
Jerome Powell
, the chair of the Federal Reserve, should 'resign immediately,' escalating an earlier call less than a week ago encouraging him to do so.
The president has repeatedly lambasted Mr Powell recently for not cutting interest rates, saying he was costing the country a 'fortune' in debt-servicing costs.
In a social media post on Wednesday, Mr Trump linked to an article about comments from Bill Pulte, the head of the US Housing Finance Agency, who wrote on social platform X that the Fed chair should be investigated for 'his political bias, and his deceptive Senate testimony'.
At issue is Mr Powell's insistence that the Fed can afford to be patient about cutting interest rates with the economy still on solid footing and inflation risks rising again because of Mr Trump's
tariffs
.
READ MORE
On Tuesday, Mr Powell hinted that the Fed would have been able to lower rates if it were not for those policies.
In his statement on X, Mr Pulte, who leads the agency that regulates mortgage firms Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, accused Mr Powell of making false statements at a congressional hearing about the swelling costs of a planned renovation of the Fed's headquarters.
[
Fed holds rates unchanged as Donald Trump calls chairman Jerome Powell 'stupid'
Opens in new window
]
At that hearing, Powell pushed back on media reports that the plans included features like a VIP diningroom and new marble table.
The administration's attacks on Mr Powell are not new. Just in the past week, Trump has called Mr Powell a 'stubborn mule' and penned him a handwritten note to apply pressure on the Fed to lower interest rates.
How the wealthy are buying up land to avoid inheritance tax
Listen |
22:03
The president has also previously threatened to remove Powell from his role as chair before his term expires in 2026, but the Supreme Court recently signalled he is not able to do so.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times
.
2025 The New York Times Company
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Irish Times
36 minutes ago
- Irish Times
Abrego Garcia claims he was beaten and tortured in El Salvador prison
Kilmar Abrego Garcia was severely beaten, deprived of sleep and subjected to psychological torture at an El Salvador mega-prison after he was wrongly deported by the Trump administration, his lawyers said in a court filing. Mr Abrego Garcia spent more than three weeks at the notorious terrorism confinement centre known as Cecot before he was transferred to another lock-up in El Salvador and ultimately brought back to the US to face criminal charges. In a filing Wednesday, Mr Abrego Garcia's lawyers argued that in light of the abuse he was subject to at the prison, he should be returned to Maryland to contest his continued detention in the state where he was living with his wife and child before his arrest in March by immigration officials. 'Once again the media is falling all over themselves to defend Kilmar Abrego Garcia,' department of homeland security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement. 'We hear far too much about gang members and criminals' false sob stories and not enough about their victims.' READ MORE Mr Abrego Garcia's case has become a lightning rod for US president Donald Trump's immigration policy, under which the administration has increased deportations of undocumented migrants. Attorney general Pam Bondi has said an investigation determined that Mr Abrego Garcia was a member of the criminal gang MS-13 – a claim he denies – and a 'danger to our community'. His lawyers said in the filing that when he and about 260 other deportees arrived at Cecot on March 15th, they were greeted by a prison official who stated, 'Welcome to CECOT. Whoever enters here doesn't leave.' He was then forced to strip and 'subjected to physical abuse including being kicked in the legs with boots and struck on his head and arms to make him change clothes faster', his lawyers wrote. After that, the lawyers claim, his head was shaved and he was beaten with wooden batons as he was he was frogmarched to a cell with some 20 other Salvadorans. The inmates were forced to kneel on the floor all night 'with guards striking anyone who fell from exhaustion', said the filing. Mr Abrego Garcia's attorneys also said his experience at Cecot undercuts the claim that he has gang ties. Prison officials moved some inmates to other cells if they believed them to be gang members, but they did not move Mr Abrego Garcia, said the filing. 'Prison officials explicitly acknowledged that plaintiff Abrego Garcia's tattoos were not gang-related, telling him 'your tattoos are fine'.' – Bloomberg
Irish Examiner
2 hours ago
- Irish Examiner
Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump to speak by phone
US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin have said they will speak by phone on Thursday. It will be their sixth publicly disclosed chat since Mr Trump returned to the White House this year. Neither leader offered any immediate details on the topic. Their previous publicly known call came on June 14, a day after Israel attacked Iran. Their resumed contacts appeared to reflect both leaders' interest in mending US-Russian ties that have plummeted to their lowest point since the Cold War amid the conflict in Ukraine. Emergency services work to extinguish a fire following a Russian attack in the Donetsk region of Ukraine (Ukrainian Emergency Service via AP) Thursday's call follows the Pentagon's confirmation that it is pausing shipments of some weapons to Ukraine as it goes about a global review of US military stockpiles. The weapons being held up for Ukraine include air defence missiles, precision-guided artillery and other equipment. The details on the weapons in some of the paused deliveries were confirmed by a US official and former national security official familiar with the matter. On Tuesday, Mr Putin and French President Emmanuel Macron held their first direct telephone call in almost three years.
Irish Times
3 hours ago
- Irish Times
Any EU trade deal with US would be limited in scope initially to avoid July 9th tariffs, von der Leyen says
Any trade deal between the European Union and the United States to avoid steep trade tariffs would be limited to an 'agreement in principle', with further details to be worked out later, the European Commission president Ursula von der Leye n has said. US president Donald Trump has threatened to put tariffs of 50 per cent on imports sold into the US from the EU, if the two sides have not agreed a trade deal by July 9th. Near-blanket tariffs on 10 per cent have been charged on EU goods since early April, with cars and steel subject to higher duties. Speaking in Aarhus, Denmark, Ms von der Leyen said EU negotiators were 'ready for a deal' and wanted a negotiated solution to the transatlantic trade tensions. 'At the same time we are all preparing for the possibility that no satisfactory agreement is reached,' the head of the EU executive said. READ MORE 'As always in negotiations you never know when they are successfully concluded, we are aiming at the 9th of July,' she said. [ EU-US trade deal: Cabinet expects 10% baseline tariffs to remain even if agreement is reached Opens in new window ] It would be 'impossible' for any agreement next week to have trashed out the 'very complex' detail required for a full trade EU-US deal, given the two sides had only been in talks for three months, the German politician said. The EU was finalising a 'rebalancing' package of counter tariffs it would hike on a range of US products and industries, in the event Mr Trump's higher import duties on European businesses came into effect, she added. Earlier today, the Minister for Finance Paschal Donohoe said he believes an agreement on tariffs was 'possible, but not certain.' Speaking to Ivan Yates on Newstalk's Pat Kenny Show, Mr Donohoe said that the EU would be looking for the minimum level of tariff possible 'And then for sectors that are really important to us we will be making the case that they're very important to America for special recognition of them. I think an agreement is possible, but I don't believe it's certain. 'At the moment, an assessment, a report, is being conducted by the United States government into the life science and medicine sector. And basically, the argument that Ireland is making, along with the European Union, is that if you value affordability in medicines that can make an increasingly big difference to your life, that global supply chains have a big role to play in that. 'And if you want to ship those medicines to other parts of the world, having some of your supply chain outside of America is in your long-term interest for doing that. And that briefly is the case that we are making.' Mr Donohoe said it would be 'very grim for both sides if the situation were to descend to 'tit-for-tat territory'. Trade between the EU and the US was worth €4 billion every day, if a deal did not happen and there were 'escalatory measures' that would mean the price of goods would go up on both sides of the Atlantic, which would have an impact on inflation. The second thing that would happen, he said, would be a real risk that this would be damaging for growth and for jobs, he said. 'We published figures a few weeks ago here in Ireland. A forecast of the impact on the GDP? So we did two things. We said if there's no tariffs, what will our economy look like? And if tariffs are applied, and what we modelled it as on, 10 per cent on everything going into the US and 60 per cent between the US and China. 'And what that would mean for the Irish economy very broadly is that we would still grow, but we would grow at a lower pace. We would still have a record number of people at work, but probably up to 75,000 fewer jobs created across the next two to four years and then we would see our public finances still being surplused but a smaller surplus.'
