This is The Takeaway from today’s Morning Brief, which you can sign up to receive in your inbox every morning along with:
During the disorienting flurry of Trump’s executive orders, Fed Chair Jerome Powell issued an edict of his own.
“I’m not going to have any response or comment whatsoever on what the president said,” Powell said at the press conference Wednesday following the Fed’s January meeting. “It’s not appropriate for me to do so.”
In the face of an emboldened president demanding a rate cut, Powell held his ground by not engaging. If you were looking for some resistance figure in Powell, however, you won’t find it. The Fed held rates steady at 4.25 to 4.50%, as expected.
Read more: Fed rate decision: How it affects your bank accounts, loans, credit cards, and investments
“Don’t look for us to do anything else,” he said, shortly reminding everyone of his nonpartisan data analysis mandate.
And for the central banker, there’s not much need to comment. Answering one of the burning questions the market had, Powell said he has had “no contact” with the president.
What he has heard, like the rest of us, is Trump’s chest-thumping tariff threats. But he isn’t reacting to that either. And without anything concrete, what is there to do to anyway, but to simply be ready and pay attention?
Prominently on display throughout the conference, this “wait and see” approach to Trump-inspired uncertainty may have a stabilizing effect in the national discourse reacting to the data. There is no pre-suffering at the Fed.
“We don’t need to be in a hurry to adjust our policy stance,” he said.
Which makes sense. Powell acknowledged — or reminded — that we don’t know what goods will be tariffed, for how long, which countries will be targeted, and what retaliation will follow. We also don’t know for sure where those potential price increases will show up after all the transactions along the way between the manufacturer and the consumer. There are so many variables, Powell said.
“We need to let those policies be articulated before we can make a plausible assessment,” he added.
In other words, it’s all speculation, which, for now, remains study and modeling fodder for the Fed’s staff of economists, who Powell defended, artfully dodging an explosive question laced with criticism from Trump proxy Elon Musk about a bloated Fed.
