Trump Pressures Fed to Cut Rates as Policy Makers Set to Decide

President Donald Trump pushed the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates as policy makers ready for their decision this month on whether to do so.

“Very inexpensive, in fact productive, to move now,” Trump tweeted Monday. “The Fed raised & tightened far too much & too fast.”

The president has repeatedly attacked the Fed for more than a year, calling on policy makers and Chairman Jerome Powell to reduce rates after increasing them in 2018.

Powell and his colleagues do look primed to ease by a quarter percentage point when they meet July 30-31 in Washington. While data on the U.S. economy is generally strong, policy makers have said they are monitoring the risks of slowing global growth and elevated trade tensions. Officials have now entered their quiet period on public comment ahead of the gathering.

Trump also repeated his view in Monday’s tweets that if the Fed had kept rates lower for longer, the U.S. economy would be stronger, and renewed his claim that other nations were manipulating their currencies to steal an advantage over the U.S.