President Trump on Tuesday blamed Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell for a string of negative economic developments, including the stock market’s recent slide and General Motors’s plan to shutter U.S. factories and lay off thousands of workers.
“I’m doing deals and I’m not being accommodated by the Fed,” Trump said in an interview with The Washington Post. “They’re making a mistake because I have a gut, and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me.”
The comments mark an escalation of Trump’s criticism of Powell, whom he nominated last year to lead the central bank, over rising interest rates. They also indicate the president does not believe he bears responsibility for the negative economic news this week.
“So far, I’m not even a little bit happy with my selection of Jay,” Trump told the Post. “Not even a little bit. And I’m not blaming anybody, but I’m just telling you I think that the Fed is way off-base with what they’re doing.”
Trump has blasted Powell frequently since July for continuing a series of Fed interest rate hikes that began in December 2015. The Fed has raised rates eight times since the end of 2015, six times during Trump’s term and three times since Powell took over the central bank in February.
Trump is one of few Republican politicians and right-leaning officials opposed to the Fed’s efforts to bring interest rates back toward historically neutral levels. The president says he believes the Fed should keep interest rates low to stimulate the already-strong economy.
Interest rate hikes also suppress stock market gains — Trump’s preferred economic scorecard — by raising the price of borrowing and narrowing corporate profit margins.
U.S. stocks have erased their 2018 gains amid a Wall Street sell-off triggered in part by rising rates, along with fading economic growth and the mounting costs of Trump’s tariffs.
The president, however, expressed confidence that the U.S. economy would not enter a recession.
The president has repeatedly pointed to strong economic growth as evidence his policies, such as tax cuts and deregulation, are working.
GM’s announcement this week that it plans to cut 15 percent of its North American workforce could pose a political threat to Trump heading into the 2020 elections. Two plants it plans to shutter are located in Ohio and Michigan, two states Trump won in 2016.
President Donald Trump claimed today that the stock market is having “big headaches” because of the Democrats.
The Democrats taking the House means they will be able to conduct investigations, and Trump borrowed a phrase that Mitch McConnell has used before – “presidential harassment” – only this time in reference to the market:
The prospect of Presidential Harassment by the Dems is causing the Stock Market big headaches!
“The prospect of Presidential Harassment by the Dems is causing the Stock Market big headaches!” he tweeted.
Trump recently said at a jobs event that if the midterms didn’t go well for the GOP, “I think you’re going to lose a lot of money.”
Axios reported on Monday that “there are at least 85 topics that Democrats have said they’d target — or are expected to target — in the forthcoming torrent of investigations and subpoenas to be directed at the Trump White House.”
President Trump falsely claimed Wednesday that, “in one sense,” the stock market rally since his election reduces the $20 trillion national debt.
Let’s break down his astonishing claim.
“The country — we took it over, it owed $20 trillion,” Trump Sean Hannity of Fox News in Pennsylvania.
So far, so good. It’s correct that the U.S. owed nearly $20 trillion when Trump took office.
“As you know, the last eight years, they borrowed more than it did in the whole history of our country. So, they borrowed more than $10 trillion dollars, right?”
Also, more or less accurate — $9 trillion to be exact.
“And yet, we picked up $5.2 trillion just in the stock market. Possibly picked up the whole thing in terms of the first nine months in terms of value. So, you can say in one sense we’re really increasing values; and maybe in a sense we’re reducing debt.”
Huh? To say this is a head-scratcher is an understatement.
Trump is right that the stock market has added trillions in value since his election.
But higher stock prices reflect corporate profits. Shareholders and investors reap the rewards. When investors get richer, it does not reduce the amount of money Congress and the federal government has already spent and owes.
The national debt, which he correctly states is $20 trillion, is the result of the government spending more than it takes in. To cut the debt, Congress has to spend less or raise taxes. That would free up cash to pay down what the U.S. owes.
“The stock market’s gains have virtually nothing to do with the size of the national debt, which continues to rise because government spending far exceeds government receipts,” political economist Greg Valliere told CNNMoney.
“A higher stock market encourages consumers and companies to spend more, which helps the overall economy,” said Valliere of Horizon Investments. “But it’s absurd to contend that the national debt has fallen because of this.”
In fact, the president wants to cut taxes and potentially add to the debt if spending cuts cannot be found to offset those tax cuts.
The White House, in a statement, said Trump “was simply making the point that we’ve seen enormous growth in the stock market since his election, that means more money in the pocket of everyday citizens, and more circulating in our economy as a whole.”
As for that stock market rally, the Standard and Poor’s 500 is up nearly 20% since his election — an impressive rally. No question investors cheer this president’s pro-business, anti-regulation, lower taxes agenda. But under the Obama Administration that same index rose 235%. And no, that stock market rally did not reduce or offset the national debt either.
The day after racially charged violence gripped Charlottesville, Virginia, President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign released an ad attacking his “enemies” for obstructing his agenda.
The ad slammed Democrats, the media and career politicians for what it said were attacks on and obstruction of Trump’s efforts while touting the President’s record so far of overseeing low levels of unemployment, record-high stock prices and what the ad called “the strongest military in decades.”
“The President’s enemies don’t want him to succeed, but Americans are saying, ‘Let President Trump do his job,'” the ad said.
The Trump campaign did not respond Sunday to requests for more details on the ad, including when and where it will run and how much it cost.
Trump took office following years of decreasing unemployment rates, and those numbers have continued to improve during his time in office. The US economy added more than one million jobs since Trump was elected. The stock market has reached record heights by some measures as well, continuing a trend since recovering from the Great Recession, with a strong increase since the November election.
The release of the Trump campaign’s new ad comes as the President continues to receive criticism for his statements Saturday in response to the violence that wracked Charlottesville over the weekend.
White nationalists gathered in Charlottesville and clashed with counterprotesters Saturday, violence that culminated in a man driving a car into a crowd, killing a woman and injuring 19 others. Two Virginia state troopers died the same day in a helicopter crash while assisting the city’s response to the violence.
Trump gave a statement Saturday condemning the violence and bigotry “on many sides” and touted his own record, including low levels of unemployment and announcements by companies such as Foxconn, an electronic components manufacturer headquartered in Taiwan, which plans to increase production in the US.
“We have so many incredible things happening in our country, so when I watch Charlottesville, to me, it’s very, very sad,” Trump said.
But in his remarks, Trump did not single out white supremacists as responsible for the violence, drawing criticism from some congressional leaders within his own party.
On Sunday, the White House offered a statement on background claiming the President’s remarks included a condemnation of white supremacy and “all extremist groups.”
Senior administration officials said Sunday that Trump was referring to white supremacist groups in his remarks.
Pressed on “State of the Union” about the President’s position towards the white supremacists, White House homeland security adviser Tom Bossert offered a condemnation of all hate groups and said Trump felt the same way.
“I condemn white supremacists and racists and white Nazi groups and all the other groups that espouse this kind of hatred,” Bossert said.
When asked by on NBC’s “Meet the Press” why Trump did not single-out the neo-Nazis or white supremacists in his comments, White House national security adviser H.R. McMaster said: “When he condemned bigotry and hatred on all sides, that includes white supremacists and neo-Nazis, and I think it’s clear. I know it’s clear in his mind.”
Trump declared his intention to run for re-election at the very beginning of his presidency and in recent months has taken part in several campaign events, including holding a $35,000-per-seat fundraiser in June.
Except these trends all existed before Donald Trump took office. The same time last year 1.2 million jobs were created, Obama took unemployment from 10 percent in 2009 to 4.9 percent in 2017, and he took the stock market from 7,949.09 in 2009 to 19,732 when he left office. And we have a larger military than the next 6 countries combined.
Donald Trump really can’t take much credit for any of these claims.
