ECONOMY/FEDERAL RESERVE/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “President Trump complained to wealthy donors at a fund-raiser in the Hamptons last week that the man he chose as chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome H. Powell, has disappointed him by raising interest rates, according to people who attended the event. In the midst of a long riff on the economy, Mr. Trump said that he had expected Mr. Powell to adhere to an easy-money monetary policy, by keeping interest rates low, when he nominated Mr. Powell in November to succeed Janet L. Yellen. Instead, Mr. Powell has continued Ms. Yellen’s pace of gradual return to historically normal rates, by raising rates twice this year…Mr. Trump previously criticized the Fed this summer, breaking with decades of presidential convention. ‘I don’t like all of this work that we’re putting into the economy and then I see rates going up,’ Mr. Trump told CNBC in a televised interview in July. ‘I am not happy about it’…Aides have said that Mr. Trump worries that additional rate increases could slow economic growth, which is on track to reach 3 percent this year for the first time since 2005. They have insisted that Mr. Trump was not trying to intervene in Fed policy, which has historically operated independently from the executive branch, and was simply expressing his opinion. Mr. Trump also criticized Ms. Yellen as a presidential candidate in 2016, saying she should be ‘ashamed of herself’ for keeping interest rates low.”
–Jim Tankersley and Maggie Haberman, “Trump Complains About Fed Chairman’s Raising of Interest Rates,” The New York Times online, August 20, 2018