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President Trump Calls Fed Chair’s Sanity in Question
Rising rates have been one of the factors to blame for the latest sell-off, and U.S. President Donald Trump has been a vocal critic of rising interest rates, using social media and speaking engagements to denigrate the Federal Reserve’s rate-hiking with respect to monetary policy. Just last month, the Fed increased the federal funds rate for the third time this year by 25 basis points and hinted that a rate hike in December is imminent given the growth of the economy.
“I think … the Fed is making a mistake. They’re so tight. I think the Fed has gone crazy,” Trump said at a political rally in Pennsylvania.
Meanwhile, the Bank of England governor and the head of the International Monetary Fund, Mark Carney, praised the Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, in particular, during an IMF and World Bank meeting.
“Of the many qualities of Jerome Powell is he’s an individual who really understands the plumbing of the U.S. and the global financial system,” Carney said. “And that’s an incredible advantage for the system at a time that the system is changing to have someone in his position who has that level of technocratic expertise.”
Likewise, IMF managing director Christine Lagarde supplemented Carney’s remarks, saying that Powell cannot be associated with “craziness.”
“No, no, he comes across, and members of his board, as extremely serious, solid and certainly keen to base their decisions on actual information, and decide to communicate that properly,” she told CNBC.
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