Trump's latest power grab is delivering brutal consequences — to Trump

President Donald Trump’s crusade against Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell is motivated by Powell’s refusal to lower interest rate for Trump — and yet, as one economics expert pointed out, Trump’s vendetta is keeping inflation high.

“The person that Donald Trump wants to appoint to succeed Jerome Powell is this guy, Kevin Warsh, who his entire career was known as an inflation hawk, basically wanted tighter monetary policy,” economics journalist Catherine Rampell told conservative website The Bulwark’s Andrew Egger on Wednesday. “But lo and behold, [he] has changed his tune just in time to accept this nomination. And now he wants looser monetary policy, i.e. the lower interest rates that Donald Trump just coincidentally also happens to want.”

Rampell added, “He normally would sail through this confirmation process no problem, except for the fact that Thom Tillis, the senator from North Carolina who is retiring, has said: I like Kevin Warsh, but I will not allow any Fed appointment to go through … until Donald Trump drops this bogus investigation of Jerome Powell.”

Yet because Trump will not stop his politically-motivated prosecution of Powell, whose term expires in roughly a month anyway, he is undermining his own economic agenda. Trump’s war on Powell matches his attempt to fire other members of the Fed, Lisa Cook — a move that is also working its way through the Supreme Court, Rampell added.

The courts and Wall Street are not oblivious to his behavior, said Rampell, and it is undermining their faith in America’s financial institutions.

“This is really bad for inflation — the one thing that Donald Trump claimed he would deliver,” Rampell explained. “By trying to politicize the Fed, he is likely to, in the long run, make the Fed's ability to promote price stability and low inflation much worse.”

Pro-Trump entertainers like Fox Business network’s Maria Bartiromo tried to spin the level of inflation as good by arguing “the price shocks from crude oil are transitory.”

“It could have been a lot worse," Bartiromo said.

But spin like this is not working, and Trump’s hopes of prosecuting Powell are floundering in the “most basic steps of criminal investigations," according to the New York Times.

"The latest setback in the president's retribution campaign came on Friday when Judge James E. Boasberg of Federal District Court in Washington quashed grand jury subpoenas to the central bank for information about the renovations underway at its headquarters and Mr. Powell's testimony to Congress about them," reports the Times.

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