Imprisoned former White House economic adviser Peter Navarro predicted that Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell would get the boot in a second Trump administration.
“I suspect that in a hundred days this meticulous non-economist will somehow be gone,” Navarro said in an interview with Semafor. published on Tuesday.
Navarro mentioned Kevin Hassett and Tyler Goodspeed, both ex-chairmen of the Council of Economic Advisers under former President Trump, as potential replacements.
The Semafor interview was conducted from a federal prison where Navarro is serving a four-month sentence for failing to comply with a congressional subpoena issued by the House committee investigating the attack on the U.S. Capitol 6 January.
Navarro, who served as director of Trump's Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, wrote his answers to the interview questions in an email from the prison's law library, Semafor noted.
He criticized Powell's approach to dealing with inflation.
“Powell was Mnuchin's fool,” Navarro said, referring to Trump's former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. “Powell raised interest rates too quickly under Trump and slowed growth. To keep his job, Powell then raised rates too slowly to keep inflation under control under Biden.”
Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, has previously said he would not reappoint Powell to lead the Fed.
“I would not reappoint him. I thought he was always late, whether it was good or bad, but he was always late,” Trump said in an August 2023 interview with Fox Business Network's Larry Kudlow, who served as the top economic official in the White House of Trump served.
Trump, who first nominated Powell to lead the central bank in 2018, fell for the seat late in his first term when Powell and the Federal Reserve raised interest rates.
President Biden nominated Powell to a second four-year term in November 2021, and he was confirmed by the Senate in May 2022 by a vote of 80-19. His current term expires in 2026.
“I was surprised that he was reappointed. He was probably reappointed because they knew I didn't like him that much,” Trump said in the Fox Business interview last August. “I'm not a fan of Jay Powell.”
