Fed Chair Jerome Powell: Again Refuses To Cut Rates, Ignores President Trump

Go to Article

The head of the central bank, the Federal Reserve, is keeping interest rates at 4.25% to 4.5%

This is to the shock of many.

But seeing as Jerome Powell is anti-Trump, a lot of us had a feeling that the Federal Reserve Chair would pull something like this.

The head of the central bank fighting for bankers instead of Americans? What a shock!

Reuters reports:

The U.S. central bank held interest rates steady on Wednesday and policymakers signaled borrowing costs are still likely to fall in 2025, but Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell cautioned against putting too much weight on that view, and said he expects “meaningful” inflation ahead as consumers pay more for goods due to the Trump administration’s planned import tariffs.

“No one holds these … rate paths with a great deal of conviction, and everyone would agree that they’re all going to be data-dependent,” Powell said in a press conference after the end of a two-day U.S. central bank meeting where policymakers slowed their overall outlook for rate cuts in response to a more challenging outlook of weaker economic growth, rising joblessness, and faster price increases.

If not for tariffs, Powell said, rate cuts might actually be in order, given that recent inflation readings have been favorably low.

But a cost shock is coming, he insisted, with producers, manufacturers and retailers still involved in a complicated struggle over who will pay the levies imposed so far, and President Donald Trump still contemplating an aggressive set of import duties that could go into effect early next month.

“Everyone that I know is forecasting a meaningful increase in inflation in coming months from tariffs, because someone has to pay for the tariffs … between the manufacturer, the exporter, the importer, the retailer,” Powell said. “People will be trying not to be the ones who can pick up the cost. Ultimately, the cost of the tariff has to be paid, and some of it will fall on the end consumer.”

“We’ll make smarter and better decisions if we just wait a couple of months or however long it takes to get a sense of really what is going to be the pass-through of inflation” from the higher import taxes, Powell said.
In new economic projections released alongside the Fed’s statement, policymakers sketched a modestly stagflationary picture of the economy, with growth in 2025 slowing to 1.4%, unemployment rising to 4.5%, and inflation ending the year at 3%, well above the current level.

While policymakers still anticipate cutting rates by half a percentage point this year, as they projected in March and December, they slightly slowed the pace from there to a single quarter-percentage-point cut in each of 2026 and 2027 in a protracted fight to return inflation to their 2% target.

And there was a split among the 19 policymakers, with seven of them feeling no rate cuts will be needed. That diversity of views reflects that while uncertainty over Trump’s tariff policy is down from its peak in April, it’s still “a very foggy time,” Powell said, adding that policymakers may have divergent assessments of the risk that inflation could stay persistently higher, or that the labor market could weaken.

Here’s President Trump calling out Powell:

“End the Fed” isn’t just a fun phrase.

It’s breaking our chains to the endless usury slave system that is the Federal Reserve.

Freedom or Federal Reserve.

You can NOT have both.



Comment on this Article Via Your Disqus Account