Vice President Vance praised Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell as a person during a recent interview but argued that Powell has been “wrong about almost everything.”
“Well, first of all, I think the president is right about Jerome Powell. Jerome Powell, he’s a nice guy, but he’s been wrong about almost everything. He was way too late in combating the Biden inflation, and now I think he’s way too late in actually helping us fight back against some of these ridiculous trade deals that have stolen the wealth of the American people,” Vance said during his interview on Fox News.
“And so, I think Jerome Powell is just wrong about that,” he told host Martha MacCallum.
President Trump has criticized the Fed chair in recent weeks. Earlier on Thursday, when asked if he planned to meet with Powell, the president described it as “like talking to a wall.”
“Well the Bank of England cut, China cut, everybody’s cutting but him,” Trump said. “We’ll see what happens. It’s a shame. I call him ‘Too Late.'”
Trump’s critique came a day after the central bank decided not to cut interest rates, holding them steady at a range of 4.25 percent to 4.5 percent despite the president’s pressure.
“The labor market is solid, inflation is low. We can afford to be patient as things unfold. There’s no real cost to our waiting at this point,” Powell said during a Wednesday press conference.
“There’s a great deal of uncertainty about … where tariff policies are going to settle out and also, when they do settle out, what will be the implications for the economy, for growth and for employment,’ the Fed chair added.
Powell was nominated as Fed chair in 2017 by Trump and was reappointed by Biden.
Vance also defended Trump’s tariff agenda during his Fox News interview, saying the Trump administration inherited the “highest peacetime deficits” in the country’s history.
“We had $34 trillion in debt and growing under Joe Biden’s economy. And the president has been very honest with the American people. You don’t get to peace and prosperity by doing the same thing you have under the Biden administration or frankly that that we have done in this country for 40 years. We gotta take this country in a different direction,” the vice president said.
“We have to renegotiate some of these trade deals. We have got to open up foreign markets to America-made things, and we’ve got to make our country more self-reliant,” Vance added. “These are long-term big plays.”
