“Trump can’t influence the Federal Reserve much — for right now.
When it comes to interest rates, which are basically how much it costs to borrow money, Trump can complain they are too high (or too low) like any other American, but the Fed’s leaders are the only government officials with the power to adjust those rates. The Fed has lowered interest rates this year as inflation has declined, but it kept rates fairly high for the last few years, in part to fight pandemic-era inflation. Even with the lower rates, however, many Americans are still finding it too expensive to borrow money so they can make big purchases like a home.
Forcing or pressuring the Fed to lower interest rates won’t necessarily fix high borrowing costs for Americans; the interest rates set by the Fed are actually short-term costs that banks pay to each other to borrow money. The Fed’s decisions influence the cost of borrowing, but there are a lot of other factors that go into consumer credit.”
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“Trump might try to meddle in the Fed’s affairs is by trying to fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. Trump appointed Powell, but was highly critical of Powell’s decision-making during his first term, and reportedly looked into whether he could fire the Fed chair.
Powell has said he will serve through the rest of his term, which doesn’t end until 2026, but has declined to say whether he would stay on for a third term.
Legally, Trump cannot force Powell to resign or fire him. Members of the Fed’s Board of Governors, which Powell is part of as the Fed chair, can only be fired for wrongdoing or job performance reasons, not differences in policy. Trump could try to fire Powell claiming he’s performing his job poorly, but that decision would probably embroil the president-elect in a drawn-out legal battle”
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“Because the Federal Reserve was created by an act of Congress, it would take congressional action to make any changes to how it works. Congress has made some changes over the decades, but there’s no signal right now that most lawmakers are willing to challenge the independence of the institution.”
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“come May 2026, Trump will be able to have some congressionally authorized say in Fed policy. That’s when he’ll be required to appoint a Fed chair for a new four-year term, who’ll then have to undergo Senate confirmation. That may be Powell, or it could be someone more compliant with Trump’s idea of what the Fed should be.”
https://www.vox.com/donald-trump/386048/trump-federal-reserve-powell-interest-rates-congress-inflation
“The reason for the plunging lira is no secret. In contrast to virtually every economist on the planet, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan insists that low interest rates and cheap money fuel a thriving economy that fights inflation. His claims—dubbed “insane” in some quarters—don’t seem to have done much for the value of the currency. Nevertheless, he sticks to his policy and fires officials who disagree.
Instead, what Erdogan has actually accomplished is a surging money supply that dilutes the value of the lira and has driven Turks to despair.”
“Powell’s innovation as Fed chair was to really care much more about employment, relative to inflation, than his recent predecessors had.
In 2019, he began lowering interest rates during an economic expansion, a genuinely unprecedented action that conceded the rate hikes he introduced the previous year were a mistake.
He repeatedly invoked homelessness and high Black unemployment as reasons to keep pushing rates lower, saying the job wasn’t done until it was done for everyone.
In 2020, he issued a new formal framework explicitly pushing the Fed away from its traditional fixation with inflation and toward worrying about employment.
He made these changes in the context of a world where inflation was consistently low and employment and wages were short of where they should’ve been. But in 2020, and especially 2021, the tasks before Powell changed. First he had to prevent a pandemic-driven collapse of the global financial system akin to what occurred in 2008.
Then he was — is — faced with the question of what to do now that inflation is high for the first time in decades. That challenge, and the question of whether Powell can be as effective at controlling inflation as he has been at promoting employment, will frame his next term.”
“The newest of the papers, authored by John Kaufman, Leslie Salas-Hernández, Kelli Komro, and Melvin Livingston in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, examined monthly data across the US from 1990 to 2015 and estimated that a $1 increase in the minimum wage led to a 3.4 to 5.9 percent decline in suicides among adults with a high school education or less. The authors also estimated that over the 26-year period, a $1 increase in each state’s minimum wage could have prevented 27,550 suicide deaths, or about 1,059 per year.
The paper has created a bit of a stir. But it’s just one of four studies in the past couple of years to find an association between higher minimum wages and lower death rates (specifically suicides).
If these findings hold up in subsequent research, they provide a new, persuasive rationale for raising the minimum wage.”