In brief
- Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell said Tuesday he would have likely lowered interest rates in 2025 already if President Donald Trump hadn’t pursued his volatile tariff agenda.
- Trump has been aggressively lobbying Powell to cut interest rates for months without success.
- Bitcoin’s price was mostly unaffected by the statement, though the coin routinely rises and falls on interest rate-related news.
Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell clapped back at President Donald Trump Tuesday, maintaining he would have lowered interest rates by now—if not for the president’s tariff agenda.
“I do think that’s right,” Powell said Tuesday at a European Central Bank forum in Portugal, when asked whether he would have raised interest rates in 2025 absent the president’s tumultuous policy changes.
For months, Trump has assailed Powell to no avail, demanding the central banker slash interest rates in the United States.
On Friday, the president called Powell—who he elevated to run America’s banking system in 2019—a “stubborn mule” and a “stupid person.”
Powell has steadfastly refused to lower rates, however, arguing that doing so amid the current volatile and uncertain condition of the U.S. economy could trigger inflation.
The president’s on-again, off-again approach to levying sweeping tariffs against America’s top trading partners has pushed the central bank to adopt a more cautious “wait and see” approach since Trump re-entered the White House in January.
In recent years, the prices of top cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin have become increasingly tied, like the stock market, to interest rates and other macro economic signifiers. In recent weeks, escalating tensions between Powell and Trump have caused the price of Bitcoin and other crypto tokens to slump.
Powell’s comments Tuesday appear to have left Bitcoin mostly unaffected. The world’s top cryptocurrency is down just 1.3% in the last 24 hours, to $105,859 at writing.
On Tuesday, Powell also expressed support for pending stablecoin legislation in Congress.
“If we’re going to have stablecoins, and apparently we are, we need to have a federal and state level regulatory framework,” the Fed chair said.
Powell has previously expressed support for crypto legislation, though that support has often sounded more like an acknowledgement of the industry’s political and economic ascendance than a full-throated endorsement of its underlying value proposition.
“What I do see is a very significant change in the tone, and it really does reflect [the] evolving thinking and the evolving status of the crypto industry,” Powell said of prevailing Wall Street sentiment, during testimony before Congress last week. “I would expect, over time, we’ll see more activity.”
Edited by Andrew Hayward
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