Tuesday, April 30, 2019

What did Donald Trump do today?

He begged the Federal Reserve to save the country from a looming economic crisis—though he probably didn't know he was doing that.

Trump has appointed all but one of the people who run the nation's independent central bank, the Federal Reserve, and is trying (with a notable lack of success) to find nominees for two more vacant seat. 

In spite of having virtually all of his own hand-picked people in that job, Trump has lashed out repeatedly at the Fed for raising or failing to lower interest rates, which he sees as a simple, uncomplicated mechanism to improve any economy. In tweets today, Trump demanded that the Federal Reserve do "some lowering of rates, like one [percentage] point, and some quantitative easing."

In economic terms, Trump simply doesn't know what he's talking about. But in purely pro-Trump political terms, pouring the tiny bit of emergency stimulus the Fed has "saved up" with its recent rate hikes into the U.S. economy right before an election makes sense—if you don't care what happens to the economy after that. 

Normally, presidents avoid criticizing the Fed in public for two reasons: they can't do anything about it anyway, and doing so risks destabilizing markets or undermining confidence in the economy. The good news is that markets seemed to have gotten better at ignoring Trump—because investors have confidence that the Fed will ignore him, too. 

So what?

  • When you know nothing about a subject, you should probably defer to people who know more than nothing about it.
  • Presidents don't need to be economists, but they do have to know the very most basic concepts about how economies work in order to do their jobs.
  • It's bad if the best outcome to a situation involves a president's appointees ignoring him.