Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers threw in his two cents on William Dudley’s op-ed piece that calls for the Federal Reserve to interfere with President Donald Trump’s 2020 reelection chances, saying it “might be the least-responsible statement by a former financial official in decades.”
Summers, in a series of tweets Wednesday, went on to call Dudley’s op-ed “the worst case of Trump derangement in the financial world.”
Bill Dudley’s Bloomberg oped, The Fed Shouldn’t enable Trump, is the worst case of @realDonaldTrump derangement in the financial world. https://t.co/IJRTkq9DKB via @bopinion
— Lawrence H. Summers (@LHSummers) August 28, 2019
Bill Dudley’s @business oped might be the least responsible statement by a former financial official in decades.
— Lawrence H. Summers (@LHSummers) August 28, 2019
Dudley’s piece, which ran on Bloomberg Tuesday, calls Trump’s reelection a threat to the U.S. and global economy, and calls for the Fed to consider how its policies could affect the outcome of the 2020 election.
Per Bloomberg:
After all, Trump’s reelection arguably presents a threat to the U.S. and global economy, to the Fed’s independence and its ability to achieve its employment and inflation objectives. If the goal of monetary policy is to achieve the best long-term economic outcome, then Fed officials should consider how their decisions will affect the political outcome in 2020.
But even that was too far for Summers, who has been a consistent critic of Trump in the past, according to CNBC. He went on CNBC Thursday to defend his position, saying that the Fed should “stay out of politics.”
“The Fed’s job is to stay out of politics,” Summers said. “The Fed’s job is to respond to the best assessment they can make of economic conditions … and to adjust interest rates appropriately.”
He went on to attack Dudley’s decision to even publish the op-ed, saying that it was an abuse of his former position at the central bank.
“For a trusted formal official of the Fed, whose thinking is inevitably going to be tied to the Fed, to recommend that they raise interest rates so as to subvert the economy and influence a presidential election is grossly irresponsible, and is an abuse of the privilege of being a former Fed official.”
Summers isn’t the only one up in arms over the op-ed, either. On Thursday, GOP North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis said he is asking Banking Committee Chair Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, to commence a hearing “regarding Fed independence,” according to Politico.