Lael Brainard
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
I do.
I think that the Supreme Court case on whether the president can fire a sitting governor of the Federal Reserve Board without any due process and without showing a clear connection to their ability to undertake the responsibilities that they were confirmed by the Senate to do is extremely important for the independence of the Fed.
And I think that the press conference, the statement today,
just really conveyed the message that the Federal Reserve is doing its job.
It is staying out of the political fray.
It is looking carefully at the data and making policy exactly on the lines that Congress
told it to, which is to preserve a strong labor market, maximum employment, and to get inflation down to 2 percent.
And I think that was the focus of the Federal Reserve chair today in the press conference, didn't allow himself to get distracted, didn't really get pulled into the political fray.
Well, certainly that is important to the president.
He has said that many times, that the chair that he selects needs to reflect his views.
On the other hand, all of the candidates also will be looking carefully at the data.
We heard a lot about the data today from Chair Powell.
We saw that the statement reflected
the fact that there's been an upgrade to the labor market, there's less concern now about unemployment.
And so the new chair is going to have to get support from the remainder of the committee, that committee that's been in place for some time now, if he wants to take the committee
in a very different direction.
And he'll have to do it based on the dual mandate that was provided by Congress and based on the evolution of the outlook and the data.
Well, we're certainly seeing this divergence with strong aggregate growth clearly being driven by the AI boom, the boom in data centers, in semiconductors, in AI infrastructure.
But on the other hand, we're seeing the labor market basically treading water with low high
Hiring, low firing being kind of the characterization really of the last several months in the labor market.