Donald Trump’s vexed relationship with America’s central bank took an ugly turn this week, and for once, the president was not the aggressor.
A year of presidential complaints about rising interest rates has had lawyers dusting down the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. Mr Trump believes the ambiguously worded statute gives him the right to fire Jay Powell, the man he appointed as Fed chair at the end of 2017. So far the president has contented himself with trying to influence Mr Powell’s ways instead, branding the former Carlyle Group partner an “enemy” of America, and likening him to “a golfer who can’t putt”.
But on Tuesday, a former senior Fed official suggested the US central bank could instead try to prod voters into firing the president. Bill Dudley, who until last year served as vice-chair of the Fed’s rate-setting committee, wrote an opinion article advising his former colleagues not to try to ease the economic damage from Mr Trump’s trade war with China, and to “consider how their decisions will affect the political outcome in 2020”. Mr Trump’s re-election, he added, presented a threat to the US economy.