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Trump Should Name His Fed Chair Replacement Now, Not Later
[American Liberty] Markets do not wait. Investors, lenders, and entrepreneurs thrive on clarity, not suspense. President Trump understands this better than any recent occupant of the Oval Office. When he senses uncertainty, he instinctively moves to resolve it. He did so with taxes, with regulation, and with foreign policy. The time has come for him to do it again, this time by naming Jerome Powell’s successor as Chairman of the Federal Reserve now, not eleven months from now. This is not a rupture of norms, but an embrace of responsibility. Naming the next Fed Chair is not simply an administrative matter, it is a macroeconomic signal, a moral declaration, and a political necessity.Consider the context. The US economy is wobbling between resilience and recession. Inflation has cooled but not vanished. Consumers are cautious. Small businesses hesitate to expand. The yield curve remains inverted. And yet the Federal Reserve, under Powell’s sluggish stewardship, refuses to cut interest rates decisively. Their reasoning? Prudence, or perhaps cowardice, cloaked in the language of inflation targeting. But there is a more unsettling possibility, one that few in polite circles dare acknowledge: partisanship. Every single economist at the Federal Reserve is a registered Democrat. Not one has donated a dollar to a Republican candidate in over twenty-five years. That fact, standing alone, ought to give the public pause. Powell told the Senate this week, "If we make a mistake here, people will pay... the cost for a long time." But millions are already paying the price for the Fed’s mistake of raising rates too far, too fast, and keeping them high for too long, even as Europe cuts rates in response to similar economic conditions. The Fed’s refusal to follow suit cannot be attributed solely to monetary caution. It increasingly appears ideological, a quiet campaign of economic resistance against a president they loathe and a movement they fear. Now enter the central philosophical question. Should the executive branch, led by a duly elected president with a national mandate, exercise some influence over the nation’s monetary trajectory, or should it leave such questions entirely to an unelected elite ensconced in an institution that prides itself on "independence"? That word, like many others in modern technocracy, conceals more than it reveals. Independence, in practice, often means unaccountability. The Federal Reserve is not a Platonic guardian class. It is a government agency, and its decisions, however "data driven," have massive distributive consequences. Rate policy determines who gets a mortgage, who hires, who invests, and who saves. Historically, presidents have understood this reality and have acted accordingly. Lyndon Johnson infamously browbeat Fed Chair William McChesney Martin at his Texas ranch in 1965 for raising rates during the Vietnam buildup. Richard Nixon hounded Arthur Burns into keeping rates low ahead of the 1972 election. Ronald Reagan, while more tactful, made it abundantly clear what kind of monetary policy he expected from Paul Volcker, and later appointed Alan Greenspan to ensure continuity. These interventions, while criticized in retrospect, were hardly the undermining of constitutional order. They were expressions of democratic accountability. Posted by: Besoeker 2025-06-29 |
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