President Donald Trump’s supporters on Wall Street aren’t thrilled about his administration’s latest attack on the chairman of the United States’ central bank.
In a Friday article for the New York Post, Fox Business contributor Charles Gasparino quoted numerous high-level sources in the financial sector who are growing increasingly concerned about the Department of Justice (DOJ) launching a criminal investigation into Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell. According to Gasparino, conservatives in the financial world are worried that Trump installing a loyalist atop the Fed after Powell’s term ends later this month would mean that fewer institutional investors will buy U.S. Treasury securities, thus weakening the value of the dollar and jeopardizing the economy as a whole.
“The feeling among most of the senior staff in the White House is that the president is screwing things up with this investigation of Powell, though no one will publicly admit it,” one Wall Street executive anonymously confided to Gasparino. “It’s also unclear if they have made that case to Trump himself.”
Even after Powell’s term ends as chairman, he could choose to remain on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, which would prevent Trump from appointing anyone else to the Fed’s board until 2028. Gasparino’s sources heaped criticism on Powell over his policies, and argued that he would still be able to influence Fed policy through the remainder of Trump’s second term if he remained on the board out of spite.
“This thing is next level dumb and I’m largely a fan of the president,” an unnamed Wall Street employee told Gasparino. “It actually makes it harder now for the Fed to cut rates because they will look like they were intimidated which will make it harder to sell our debt.”
Gasparino hypothesized that the investigation into the Fed chair — which is over him allegedly lying to Congress about the Fed’s renovations to its Washington D.C. campus — is unlikely to pay dividends for Trump. The Fox Business contributor asserted that it’s more likely that Powell remains on the Fed’s board to act as a “counterweight” to the Trump administration, where he would “become a martyr for central bank sovereignty.”
Click here to read Gasparino’s full report in the New York Post.
