Trump's demands for next Fed chief: lower rates and look the part
wants a Federal Reserve chairperson who will cut rates, which are currently 4.5 per cent, to 1 per cent.
Delusional? Perhaps, but this is Trumpworld.
Trump isn't the first president to pressure the Fed. In 1965 Lyndon Johnson told William McChesney Martin his rate hike was 'despicable'.
Richard Nixon successfully leant on Arthur Burns to ease policy before the 1972 election, driving short-term growth but long-term inflation.
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Unlike his predecessors, however, Trump applies pressure in public, calling Fed chief
Jerome Powell
everything from 'very average mentally' to a 'moron'.
Trump's rants about 1 per cent interest rates are alarming economist Justin Wolfers. He sees echoes of Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan, another authoritarian populist who favoured low rates over sound economics, with predictably ruinous results.
'That movie was Turkey,' says Wolfers, who fears 'an American sequel.'
Trump wants Powell to resign. Powell can refuse, but he obviously won't be reappointed when his term ends next May.
Nevertheless, Trump's problem is finding a replacement who both looks the part and will follow the script. The Wall Street Journal says Trump was impressed by Kevin Warsh's hair and appearance when interviewing him in 2017, but thought him too young-looking.
Warsh, back in contention, says zero rates lead to 'very bad economic outcomes', so he is hardly the pliable dove Trump wants.
Another contender, former World Bank president David Malpass, wants cuts, but Trump has reportedly cooled on him, doubting whether Malpass is telegenic enough for the job.
The ideal candidate, it seems, must promise cheap money and good lighting.
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Irish Times
2 hours ago
- Irish Times
Noraid: ‘They started to run it down from the early 1990s – They said I had an image as an IRA supporter'
Ernie O'Malley's pub on East 27th Street in Manhattan, between Lexington and Third, is where those of Irish birth or lineage gather to watch GAA matches from a place many still call 'home'. Next Wednesday, July 9th, however, the pub will be crowded not to watch GAA, but for RTE's latest documentary, Noraid : Irish America and the IRA, the story of Republican fundraising in the United States during the Troubles. Now ageing, the group will include Martin Galvin, Noraid's public face for decades; New York cab-driver, newspaper editor and radio presenter John McDonagh; and Father Pat Moloney, jailed for four years for a 1993 Brinks Mat heist, which he still denies. The documentary, directed by Kevin Brannigan, evocatively captures New York in the 1970s and 1980s, and the controversies surrounding an organisation blamed by the Irish and British governments, and by Washington, for raising money for IRA weapons. READ MORE Throughout the two-part documentary, the organisation's members agree on a few points – the proper title of the organisation was never Noraid but, rather, Irish Northern Aid and it never bought IRA guns. Irish-American members of Noraid protesting in New York in the 1980s Few outside the organisation have ever, or will ever, call it Irish Northern Aid, however, while few among two generations of Irish, British and US police and intelligence figures will ever accept its denials about weapons. Galvin adamantly rejects the allegations, however, pointing out that it was investigated repeatedly by the FBI and others: 'I would have been put in jail, if that was the case,' he tells The Irish Times. Equally, British intelligence had its own eyes inside Noraid since Sinn Féin figure, Denis Donaldson, outed nearly two decades later as a British informer, worked with it in New York in the early 1990s. Martin Galvin in New York in 2024. Photograph: Faolan Carey '[He] had our books open. If we were sending money back, or it was being diverted to IRA, that would have been passed on,' Galvin goes on, insisting that the money raised went, as it always said it did, to families of those affected by the Troubles. IRA figures involved in buying US weaponry, such as Gabriel Megahey or John 'The Yank' Crawley – who was later jailed for the foiled 1984 arms smuggling attempt on board the Marita Ann trawler – agree. If anything, they were told to stay away from Noraid because it would bring them to attention. Donaldson, killed later at a cottage in Donegal by people unknown, features frequently in conversation with Galvin: 'I complained about him. I could see even then that he was an informer. But I was told he had impeccable credentials.' Galvin had quickly suspected him: 'He told people I was a particular target. Then, he'd disappear for a few days and try to undermine anybody associated with me. Then, he was seen drinking with FBI people.' The first episode traces how 1920s anti-Treaty IRA men who quit, or fled, Ireland after the Civil War infused New York's Irish-American community with strong Republican feelings brought to life later with The Troubles. Remembering people such as Michael Flannery, who fought in 1916, John McDonagh says: 'Their hatred of the Free State knew no bounds. It was always, 'Free State', and 'bastards' wasn't long after it.' The second episode traces the impact of the 1981 hunger-strikes and Noraid-organised visits of Irish-Americans to Northern Ireland in the mid-1980s that radicalised opinion across Irish-America. Graphic for RTE documentary on Noraid It tracks, too, Sinn Féin's entry into the top strata of US politics, including White House visits – a process that was first pressed by Noraid calls for a Northern special envoy and a visa for then party leader Gerry Adams. It also maps the volleys of criticism from Garret FitzGerald, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and others on both side of the Atlantic and in the press, with Noraid supporters often labelled as misguided, deluded or simply supporting evil. 'We always got a fair shot from The Irish Times and [the newspaper's Washington Correspondent until 1992] Sean Cronin [who was the IRA's Chief of Staff during part of the 1950s Border Campaign],' Galvin says. Today, Noraid is a pale shadow of its former self. People still give it 'money in their wills', says Galvin, which is used for a few student bursaries and to help anyone 'being victimised today because of their involvement in the struggle'. Blacklisted for years, Galvin and others now get invited to official Irish Government events hosted by the Irish Consulate-General in Manhattan and get briefings from the Department of Foreign Affairs. [ Irish unification would cost €152m annually to give Northern Irish civil servants pay parity, report says Opens in new window ] If, however, relations with 'official' Ireland have warmed, ties with Sinn Féin have gone in the other direction – with Noraid pushed into the background and replaced by its New York-headquartered Friends of Sinn Féin. Galvin tries not to sound hurt but it is clear that he is: 'They started to run it down from the early 1990s. I was told that I was to stand back. 'We want to go in a different direction,' they said. 'They told me that I had an image as a supporter of the IRA, which I had, and that they wanted to go in a different direction,' he says. 'It was actually more difficult to step back than it had been to step forward. 'No individual is that important,' he says, with a shrug. Looking back, one senses regret in Galvin, not in his interest in Northern Ireland, his support for the IRA or his involvement in Noraid since the 1970s but, rather, at the cost it inflicted on his own life. He had joined Noraid hoping that he would not attract 'a lot of publicity' because he was then 'an assistant district attorney, a prosecutor, if you will'. He goes on: 'That was a path to a judgeship. That's what I wanted to do.' If Galvin is diplomatic, John McDonagh is not. For years, he interviewed Sinn Féin figures on his New York radio show when they were not allowed on the airwaves in the Republic of Ireland or the UK, along with editing The Irish People newspaper. One of the first signs of changing winds from Ireland came, he says, when Sinn Féin ordered an Irish pipe band in Philadelphia who had long worn berets, black ties and black jackets that they could not 'dress like that any more'. 'Sinn Féin came over, shut down everything. They traded in Irish Republicans in New York for Wall Street Republicans. They're the only Republicans that Sinn Féin want to hear about. They don't want to hear about Irish Republicans.' People who had 'carried the movement during good and hard times in New York were just jettisoned right off the bat', says McDonagh, who speaks with humour in his voice but the bitterness underneath is palpable. Neither is convinced that a United Ireland is coming soon or, perhaps, at all. Galvin wants a referendum but not one in 2030, while the British now just 'smile indulgently as if this is something that is never going to happen'. If it does, Galvin is not convinced that it would be fairly fought, believing that nationalist voters would be threatened with the loss of pension benefits and other losses if they vote for unity. Typically, McDonagh is blunter. [ 'People don't care that much': Frustrated sighs audible as students asked the 'British or Irish' question Opens in new window ] 'Listen, I've been listening to bulls**t in New York since the 1990s. Joe Cahill [the late IRA chief of staff] told me personally: 'We're getting the prisoners out and we're going to have a united Ireland in about five, 10 years.' He came and went. 'Then, Martin McGuinness said: 'We're going to have it in the next 10 years.' That went nowhere. Then, Gerry Adams said it would be in 2016, on the 100th anniversary of the Rising. That didn't happen. 'Now, we've Mary Lou coming out. Now, it's not a United Ireland because the tone has changed. It's a shared or an agreed Ireland. That's the semantics and the wording now. Everything's getting very fuzzy. 'The one thing I have found out is you can't defeat human nature. The people who get into power turn exactly into the people they just turfed out.' So, would he do it all again if he had the chance to roll the clock back 50 years? Just for a moment, he pauses, before recalling a conversation with senior IRA bomber and hunger-striker, the late Brendan 'Dark' Hughes. 'I asked him the same question as you have. 'Brendan, would you have got involved knowing how it ended?' He said, 'I wouldn't have got out of bed'. 'There are a lot of people who feel that way,' he goes on. Do Noraid people meet up now? 'At a freaking funeral home on Queens Boulevard, when they die. They're the only meetings you're going to get,' he replies, drily. Bar Ernie O'Malley's on Wednesday. Noraid: Irish America & the IRA begins Wednesday, July 9th, 9.35pm on RTÉ One
Irish Times
2 hours ago
- Irish Times
Maureen Dowd: talking past our Foundering Father
I called my brother, Kevin, to ask if he would spend Independence Day with Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and me . Monticello has a new tour focusing on the fond and fractious relationship of Jefferson and Adams, which culminated in an exchange of 158 letters in their last 14 years of life. Historian David McCullough deemed this attempt of the fiery Bostonian and reticent Virginian to overcome their political feuds and understand each other 'one of the most extraordinary correspondences in American history'. My favourite anecdote about Adams and Jefferson, who loved Shakespeare and used the Bard's psychological insights as inspiration when they conjured the country, concerned their visit to Shakespeare's house in Stratford-upon-Avon. As Abigail Adams recalled, her husband cut a relic from Shakespeare's chair, while Jefferson 'fell upon the ground and kissed it'. READ MORE [ Musk announces forming of 'America Party' in further break from Trump Opens in new window ] Our family trip to Monticello on Wednesday was suggested by Jane Kamensky, a very cool historian of the American Revolution and the president and chief executive of Monticello and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation. She thought that my Trump-supporting brother and I might appreciate the new tour, 'Founding Friends, Founding Foes,' as inspiration for 'a thoughtful dialogue across the divide'. Kevin laughed when I told him about the invitation. 'I'm amused,' he said, 'that we are the example of modern-day comity and civility.' Americans are at one another's throats, living in a world of insults, coarseness and cruelty – a world where Donald Trump and JD Vance excel. At Monticello, we talked to Ken Burns, who was giving a preview of his upcoming PBS documentary on the American Revolution. He is finishing it in the nick of time, given Trump's attempts to slash PBS' federal funding. 'The Revolution – no pictures, no newsreels, and more violent than we could possibly imagine,' the film-maker told us. 'The Revolution was not just a quarrel between Englishmen over Indian land and taxes and representation, but a bloody struggle that would involve more than two dozen nations, Europeans as well as Native Americans, that also somehow came to be about the noblest aspirations of humankind.' A year from now is the 250th birthday party for the country. In retrospect, the odds seem impossible. When the patriot militias engaged at sunrise at Lexington Green in April 1775, Burns noted, 'the chances of the success of the operation were zero.' Then, somehow, eight years later, 'we created something new in the world. We were the original anti-colonial movement. We turned the world upside down'. Adams and Jefferson constantly talked about virtue and what virtues would help mold our antimonarchical society. Trump, who plays at being a king, is not interested in virtue; only in humiliation, conflict, enrichment and revenge. (The popular president of the University of Virginia, the school here founded by Jefferson, just announced that he would resign because of Trump's anti-diversity, equity and inclusion pressure campaign.) As Trump rammed through his horrible bill, a humongous wealth transfer, he scoffed at those who suggested there was no virtue in hurting the most vulnerable to make the obscenely rich richer. He keeps insisting that no one will lose Medicaid benefits, but Republicans are cutting more than $1 trillion from the programme, so a lot of people are going to suffer. The Declaration of Independence aspired to equality, while Trump's bill deepens our inequality. He wanted it rushed through for a flashy July 4th ceremony so he could sign this dreckitude on the same day that our soaring origin statement was adopted. He timed it for maximum drama at 5pm, with military planes flying over the White House. I asked Burns if it was possible now to persuade anyone across the aisle of anything, or is everyone just howling into the storm? 'The best arguments in the world won't change a single person's point of view,' he said. 'The only thing that can do that is a good story. Good stories are a kind of benevolent Trojan horse. You let them in, and they add complication, allowing you to understand that sometimes a thing and its opposite are true at the same time.' Reading the Adams-Jefferson letters, I felt that these founders were able to resurrect their relationship the same way I'm able to preserve mine with my siblings. We approach politics carefully, without venom or overblown expectations of changing one another's minds. We look for slivers of common ground: None of us thought Joe Biden should cling to office when he was clearly declining, and none of us like it when Trump belittles people or cashes in with cheesy products like his new $249 perfume, 'Victory 45-47'. We talk about other things, movies and sports, just as Jefferson and Adams discussed wine, books and ancient Greek philosophers, with Jefferson sometimes throwing in Greek phrases. 'Lord! Lord!' Adams exclaimed with exasperation. 'What can I do, with So much Greek?' Burns said that his half-century of making documentaries about America's wars and pastimes has taught him to embrace contradictions. 'The binaries that we set up are the biggest trap, whether they come from the left or the right,' he said. 'When you see somebody making a 'them,' you have to be careful. That's antithetical to what the Declaration is saying. I hope that what we do on the Fourth of July is try to put the 'us' into the US.' – This article originally appeared in The New York Times
The Journal
3 hours ago
- The Journal
Elon Musk says he has created a new political party for the US
ELON MUSK, AN ex-ally of US President Donald Trump, has said he has launched a new political party to challenge what the tech billionaire described as the US's 'one-party system.' The world's richest person – and Trump's biggest political donor in the 2024 election – had a bitter falling out with the president after leading the Republican's effort to slash spending and cut federal jobs as head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Musk has clashed with Trump over the president's massive domestic spending plan, saying it would explode the US debt, and vowed to do everything in his power to defeat lawmakers who voted for it. Now he has created the so-called America Party, on the back of a social media poll on the website he owns, through which to try and achieve that. 'When it comes to bankrupting our country with waste & graft, we live in a one-party system, not a democracy,' the Space X and Tesla boss posted on X, the social media platform that he owns. 'Today, the America Party is formed to give you back your freedom.' By a factor of 2 to 1, you want a new political party and you shall have it! When it comes to bankrupting our country with waste & graft, we live in a one-party system, not a democracy. Today, the America Party is formed to give you back your freedom. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 5, 2025 Musk cited a poll — uploaded on Friday, US Independence Day — in which he asked whether respondents 'want independence from the two-party (some would say uniparty) system' that has dominated US politics for some two centuries. The yes-or-no survey earned more than 1.2 million responses. 'By a factor of 2 to 1, you want a new political party and you shall have it!' he posted on Saturday. Musk also shared a meme depicting a two-headed snake and the caption 'End the Uniparty.' - 'Laser-focus' on vulnerable lawmakers - Advertisement It is not clear how much impact the new party would have on the 2026 mid-term elections, or on the presidential vote two years after that. The Trump-Musk feud reignited in dramatic fashion late last month as Trump pushed Republicans in Congress to ram through his massive domestic agenda in the form of the One Big Beautiful Bill. Musk expressed fierce opposition to the legislation, and ruthlessly attacked its Republican backers for supporting 'debt slavery.' He vowed to launch a new political party to challenge lawmakers who campaigned on reduced federal spending only to vote for the bill, which experts say will pile an extra $3.4 trillion over a decade onto the US deficit. 'They will lose their primary next year if it is the last thing I do on this Earth,' Musk said earlier this week. After Musk heavily criticized the flagship spending bill — which eventually passed Congress and was signed into law — Trump threatened to deport the tech tycoon and strip federal funds from his businesses. 'We'll have to take a look,' the president told reporters when asked if he would consider deporting Musk, who was born in South Africa and has held US citizenship since 2002. On Friday after posting the poll, Musk laid out a possible political battle plan to pick off vulnerable House and Senate seats and become 'the deciding vote' on key legislation. 'One way to execute on this would be to laser-focus on just 2 or 3 Senate seats and 8 to 10 House districts,' Musk posted on X. All 435 US House seats are up for grabs every two years, while about one third of the Senate's 100 members, who serve six-year terms, are elected every two years. Some observers were quick to point out how third-party campaigns have historically split the vote — as businessman Ross Perot's independent presidential run in 1992 did when it helped doom George H.W. Bush's re-election bid resulting in Democrat Bill Clinton's victory. 'You are pulling a Ross Perot, and I don't like it,' one X user wrote to Musk. With reporting by © AFP 2023 Readers like you are keeping these stories free for everyone... A mix of advertising and supporting contributions helps keep paywalls away from valuable information like this article. Over 5,000 readers like you have already stepped up and support us with a monthly payment or a once-off donation. Learn More Support The Journal
