Trump Can and Should Fire Fed Boss Over Economy

Federal Reserve kingpin Jerome Powell is busy doing what he does best: sabotaging a prosperous economy so that President Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans lose popularity. He’s also ignoring Trump, whom voters will judge for the economy’s performance and whom the Constitution says runs the executive branch of which the Fed is a part.

This is old hat for Powell, who, after being installed by Trump in 2018, got straight to work undermining his boss’s economic recovery.

You may recall that one of the circumstances that brought an unusual candidate like Trump to power in 2016 was the preceding decade of economic malaise. The Obama years averaged just 2.1% annual growth – the most lethargic economic recovery since World War II. It was fashionable among establishment economists to say that growth above this level, especially the 4.3% average annual growth of the Reagan boom, was simply unobtainable. Big-government economists – practically a redundant phrase today – called it “secular stagnation.”