Trump Says Fed Rate Increase Would Be Wrong, Again Calls for Cut

(Bloomberg) — President Donald Trump said Federal Reserve policymakers would be wrong to raise interest rates after a blowout US jobs report, while insisting he doesn’t want to influence Kevin Warsh before he chairs his first Fed meeting.

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“Nowadays when you have good reports, the market goes down because they think they’re going to raise interest rates,” Trump said in an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press airing Sunday. “There’s no reason to raise interest rates.”

Job growth in May topped all forecasts in Friday’s US employment report, prompting a selloff in Treasuries and leading traders to fully price in a quarter-point increase in the Fed’s benchmark rate by the end of the year.

Trump’s comment adds to the economic and political forces tugging at Warsh as he prepares to chair his first Federal Open Market Committee meeting on June 16–17. Raising the benchmark rate “is the wrong thing to do,” Trump said. “We should actually lower interest rates,” he said.

Trump nominated Warsh to head the Fed after a relentless public campaign for the central bank to cut borrowing costs, though he has since said he wants Warsh to “do your own thing.”

Yet the selloff in the bond market and recalibration of Fed wagers reflects growing confidence that the Fed under Warsh will need to raise borrowing costs to contain inflation that’s running above target.

“I’m living with Kevin,” Trump told NBC. “I have a lot of respect for him, but my feeling is that when a country is doing well, they shouldn’t be penalized by immediately raising interest rates.”

“You know, we have debt, we have other things,” he added, “We have things we want to take care of. I want to go bigger on the military.”

Rate-hike expectations were reinforced by the US labor-market readings on Friday as nonfarm payrolls increased 172,000 last month after upward revisions to the prior two months, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. The US unemployment rate held steady at 4.3%.