President Trump says the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, should lower interest rates because inflation is over. Trump says the Fed should lower rates to help reduce the costs of America’s giant debt pile. He says Powell is a “stubborn mule” and should quit. More recently, administration officials have started making noises about issues with renovations at Fed headquarters, such as cost overruns, which suggests to some that they are seeking a pretext to fire Powell. All of which, argues the economist Rebecca Patterson in a guest essay, is a self-defeating strategy that will probably leave all of us worse off. The Fed’s independence from political whims is a bedrock principle that has underpinned the U.S. economy and its financial markets for decades — including your mortgage rate and car loan, if you have one. Just look to the 1970s to see what happens when markets don’t trust the central bank. Patterson has charted the administration’s cavalier approach to the various building blocks of American exceptionalism, including the dollar, immigration and trade. A serious move against the Fed and its chairman could top them all, for the worse. Read the guest essay: Here’s what we’re focusing on today:
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