By Denny Gulino
THE WHITE HOUSE (MaceNews)– President Trump Thursday said despite his personal attacks, from “boneheads” to Wednesday’s “terrible communicator,” he is not going to try to remove Jerome Powell from the helm of the Federal Reserve.
By mid afternoon Trump had tweeted no additional attacks on Powell or other Fed leadership and had not again urged the central bank to flout the G-20 consensus against targeting exchange rates for a trade advantage.
In his disappointment with only a quarter-point of easing and no promise to do more, is Trump giving up his weeks-long battle with the Fed? Since there were no public events on his schedule Thursday and no ropeline departure or arrival statements, one can only guess.
All there is to go on are the Fox News network interviews he and his economic adviser Larry Kudlow did in the morning. Is Powell’s job safe” “It’s safe. Yes, it’s safe. I mean, sure, why not,” he answered.
Why not? What was it all about, then? Maybe nothing.
San Francisco officials might hope Trump’s comments aboard Air Force One Wednesday are as meaningless. He said the Environmental Protection Agency is looking for ways to force the city to stop dumping trash, including needles, generated by communities of homeless people into the Pacific Ocean. City officials insist no such thing happens.
The EPA administrator was spotted on the White House grounds Thursday. But he would not go beyond Wednesday’s statement that the EPA cannot comment on pending investigations even though there is no evidence any such investigation was underway before Trump spoke. A government task force to assess homelessness in the state was dispatched last week.
“They have to clean it up. We can’t have our cities going to hell,” Trump was quoted as saying.
Trump’s tour of the West Coast Wednesday included several other jabs at California, which he has called a “disgrace,” including his action to prevent the state from blocking his relaxation of Obama-era emission standards for automobiles.
The anti-California campaign that is evidently some part of the larger Campaign for 2020 with a capital “C” is another of the many moving pieces at the White House where tweet attacks and policy attacks go hand in hand except in those cases, like the string of attacks on Powell and the Fed, that lead nowhere.
National Economic Council chief Kudlow, in his moments on Fox, said he would have preferred a half-point rate cut like the one favored by FOMC dissenter Jim Bullard, the St. Louis Fed president and, Kudlow said, a “thought leader.”
Boston Fed’s Eric Rosengren and Kansas City Fed’s Esther George also dissented because they wanted no rate cut at all.
The split among Federal Open Market Committee members, Powell’s reference to the next 90 days of uncertainty, the “dot plot” that foresaw no more rate cuts this year or next, all seemed to paralyze stock investors Thursday as the major indices hardly moved.
Foreign policy as well seemed to be something else flying blind as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo at some points seemed to be inheriting the hawkish mantle of John Bolton, at other times modulating the occasional hawkish statements of his boss, the president, and then reinforcing subsequent non-hawkish presidential statements about not wanting to be at war with anyone.