US President Donald Trump on Tuesday said that he intends to nominate two new candidates to the board of the US Federal Reserve, which Trump has assailed over its reluctance to lower interest rates.
Both of the president’s intended nominees, which he announced on Twitter, are economists who share his cutting opinion of the Fed.
“I am pleased to announce that it is my intention to nominate” Christopher Waller, a director of at the Fed’s satellite office in St Louis, Missouri, and conservative economist Judy Shelton, Trump tweeted.
The Fed has a seven-member board, but has had openings for many months.
The last two candidates Trump tapped for the Fed board — conservative economic commentator Stephen Moore and former pizza executive Herman Cain — were so unusual that even several US Senate Republicans said that confirming them would be out of the question.
Cain’s and Moore’s withdrawals suggested that Trump had faced difficulty in installing loyalists at the central bank.
Trump has repeatedly ignored norms designed to protect the independent Fed from political influence and routinely lambasts the central bank and its president, Jerome Powell, for raising interest rates, claiming it is holding back US economic growth, which he views as key to his re-election next year.
Christopher Waller is a former economics professor at the University of Notre Dame and director of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis. He specializes in financial theory and macroeconomics.
Judy Shelton, an outspoken critic of the central bank, is US executive director at the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development and has served on the board of Hilton Hotels.
She is an outspoken supporter of low interest rates — she has indicated she supported lowering them to 0 percent in one or two years — and often takes to Twitter to express her views.
In April, she published an editorial in the Wall Street Journal criticizing the Fed’s approach in 2008 to combating the economic recession.
She also expressed support for returning to the gold standard, a monetary system in which the standard economic unit of account is based on a fixed quantity of gold.
Trump has named three current Fed members to the board, including Fed Vice Chairman Richard Clarida, and also promoted Jerome Powell to his current post as board chair.
Powell has cautioned that economic warning signs could prove temporary and the US central bank should seek confirmation before taking any policy action.
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