Trump says it’s ‘highly unlikely’ he will fire Fed Chair Powell after broaching idea with GOP reps
President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that he was “very unlikely” that he would dismiss Jerome Powell as president of the federal reserve.
His statements, made at the oval office, come less than 24 hours after saying a room full of republican legislators whom he planned to do so.
“No, we do not intend to do anything,” Trump told journalists in response to a question of whether he wanted to fire Powell.
“I do not exclude anything, but I think it is very unlikely unless he left for fraud,” said Trump, while criticizing Powell management of a Fed renovation project that the White House had recently launched as a pretext to remove the Fed chair.
The president had asked GOP legislators on Tuesday evening what they thought to fire the president of the Fed, according to a senior White House official. They expressed their approval for dismissed him. The president then said that he would probably be soon but that no final decision had been made.
However, representative Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., Published Tuesday evening on X that Powell’s dismissal was “imminent”, something that caused a sale in the term contracts before the opening of the Wednesday market. On Wednesday at noon, the main stock market indices returned to exchange almost flat the day.
CBS News first pointed out the meeting. An Fed official refused to comment on the CNBC on the report on Trump’s meeting on Tuesday, who came after the Republicans blocked a procedural vote on the cryptographic legislation that the president promotes.
Trump and other White House personalities launched a multi-plaster attack on Powell to push the central bank to reduce its key borrowing rate. More recently, they exploded Powell on the renovations of the Fed headquarters in Washington, suspecting that Trump could try to remove it.
A recent decision of the Supreme Court indicated that the president does not have the power to withdraw at will the officials of the Fed.
In a CNBC interview on Wednesday, representative French Hill, R-Ark., Chairman of the Chamber’s Financial Services Committee, repeated that “I don’t see” Trump dismissing Powell. Treasury secretary Scott Bessent also told Bloomberg News on Tuesday that he did not expect Trump to move in that direction.
However, Luna, who joined other party members on Tuesday to block the Crypto initiative, said that a move against Powell was to come.
“Hearing Jerome Powell is licensed! From a very serious source,” she said, adding later: “I’m sure the shot is imminent.”
