BlackRock’s Rick Rieder Emerges as Strong Candidate for Federal Reserve Chair
Plus, ABC News, Ellison’s Paramount fawn over Zohran Mamdani
The Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, said this week that President Trump’s choice for the next chairman of the Federal Reserve has been narrowed down to five candidates. Two of them, Chris Waller and Michelle Bowman, are already Fed governors. A third, Kevin Warsh, is a former Fed governor. A fourth, Kevin Hassett, was at the American Enterprise Institute for a while and is now a Trump aide as director of the National Economic Council. The “two Kevins” have been talked about as Fed chair possibilities for months and months now.
The exciting newer name on the list that is worth focusing on is the one currently in the private sector—BlackRock’s Rick Rieder. A 2023 profile of him in Investor’s Business Daily reported he wakes up at “3:45 a.m. seven days a week” and has hanging in his office a uniform jersey of “Baltimore Orioles shortstop Cal Ripken Jr., who played 2,632 games in a row.”
If you look at how Trump chooses people, he frequently likes to hire for important posts those who have made a lot of money in the private sector.
Rieder’s recent public and private presentations offer a window into his thinking.
In an October 1 “market insight” for BlackRock, he wrote that “the labor market is more vulnerable than it appears,” and that “underlying core inflation is following a steady downward trend. The market pricing of inflation forwards affirms that tariff-induced price increases are a one-time price level shift, not triggers for runaway inflation.”
Rieder also stressed the ways that the current interest rates are hurting people. “The bottom 50% of households are struggling under the pressure of high rates today. This cohort has more high-interest non-mortgage debt than liquid assets and now faces weaker wage growth as the job market softens. They did see home equity gains that could theoretically help address these liquidity challenges, but they can’t access that wealth, as home equity loan rates also remain prohibitively high,” he wrote. “High rates have also resulted in a housing market stagnation…small businesses are struggling under the weight of higher borrowing costs.”
In a September 26 post to X, Rieder wrote that “large parts of the population and large sectors in the economy are struggling due to restrictive rates today.” He wrote that “The current high-rate environment continues to disproportionately burden lower-income earners while simultaneously paralyzing the housing market.”
An October 23 presentation by Rieder stressed tech-related productivity gains. “We believe that the neutral rate will ultimately settle lower than most currently expect,” it said, noting that “While the wealthy keep spending, restrictive policy is exposing lower-end stress beneath the surface; meaning, the less wealthy need relief from high rates today.” It went on, “We think the overall inflation trend can continue to moderate as inflation breakevens have recently suggested, allowing the Fed to keep cutting rates….Lower rates will have much more of a positive influence on the system than any adverse effects, especially with the growing domestic debt burden.”
My favorite part of the October 23 presentation is a grid modeling how the US debt to GDP ratio changes sensitive to the nominal GDP growth rate and interest rates on the debt. The ratio swings from a low of 93.7 percent at 5 percent growth and 2 percent rates to a high of 137.2 percent at a 4 percent interest rate and 2 percent nominal GDP growth. That’s a significant swing, since there are some market concerns of a crisis if the debt gets too large.
Rieder’s bio page at Blackrock describes him as “responsible for managing roughly $2.4 trillion in assets.” Trump loves big numbers like that. When Trump gets to the word “trillion” in a speech he’ll often stop and repeat it with a tone of wonder, as if to say to the audience, wow, that is impressive.
Rieder has some government experience as Vice Chairman and member of the Borrowing Committee for the U.S. Treasury and member of the Federal Reserve’s Investment Advisory Committee on Financial Markets.
He was at Lehman Brothers from 1987 to May 2008, which critics will pounce on, but there were a lot of smart people at Lehman Brothers, not all of them were responsible for its collapse in 2008, and a lot of them also learned from the experience and, like Rieder, have gone on to rebuild successful careers elsewhere and put 2008 far in the rearview mirror. Like Trump, Rieder has a degree from Wharton (an MBA, not the economics Ph.D. that a lot of Federal Reserve types think is a threshold necessity to be taken seriously, a rule that has a mysterious exception for Jerome Powell, who has a law degree from Georgetown).
Rieder chairs North Star Academy’s charter school network in Newark, New Jersey, which is a good sign—a lot of the best and brightest in the financial industry have been involved with education reform, and with charter schools in particular. (The firm he started when he left Lehman was called R3, which he explained to Barry Ritholtz on Bloomberg Radio “was for reading, writing and arithmetic. … 20 percent of our proceeds were going to go into urban education in the country.” He’s also involved with Emory University, which has been a real success story over the past few years, in contrast to some of what has been happening elsewhere in higher education.
His political donations over the years have been mostly to conventional Republicans—committees backing Paul Ryan, Jeb Bush and Nikki Haley—and include some Democrats, including Senator Booker, Hakeem Jeffries, Jon Tester, and Sherrod Brown. That won’t necessarily help him with Trump but could help him get Senate confirmation, which could potentially be more of a hurdle for the other candidates in the context of Democrats who want to prevent Trump from getting full control over the Federal Reserve in a way that would destroy its supposed “independence.”
In 2021 Rieder bought property in Palm Beach County, Florida, in “the same luxury enclave” as Donald Trump Jr., the Palm Beach Post reported at the time, noting that Rieder is “a frequent presence on CNBC.” Like President Trump, Rieder golfs and has a home in New Jersey. Trump loves picking people who are on television for jobs in his administration. Rieder also appears on Fox Business; here he is in August 2025. A little unconventional in appearance—unruly hair, plunging neckline (no tie), digital watch or wearable tech apparently on both wrists—but he nets out as a highly effective communicator, strong on the substance, and much better on tv than a lot of finance or policy people are.
Scott Bessent, who has been managing this process for Trump and who himself comes from the private sector (and who worked in the past for George Soros, so can probably relate in a way to Rieder having worked for Larry Fink), is a sophisticated guy with an elegant mind. Trump and America are lucky to have him as Treasury secretary. And all the more so at this moment in particular, when there are real risks, not only from tariffs and trade wars spinning out of control, but also both external—China buying gold as an attack on the dollar, Iran selling oil and gas to China to finance terrorism—and internal—entrenched, bloated, and discredited bureaucracies at the Fed and elsewhere that appear determined to resist the elected president’s agenda. This column is not an endorsement of a candidate for Fed chair, and Trump is more than capable of making his own decisions without having his options constrained or stage-managed by Bessent or by anyone else. The Kalshi prediction market has Rieder at 7 percent against Hassett at 41 percent. I don’t know what will happen and am not in the habit of placing prediction market bets, but it’s bullish for America even that a guy like Rieder is in the mix.
ABC News, Ellison’s Paramount Fawn Over Zohran Mamdani: If New York City elects a 34-year-old socialist boycott-Israel activist who wants to raises taxes by $10 billion as mayor, the press will be partly to blame. The media is giving Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani a total free ride.
“He stands on the cusp of a historic win,” ABC News’s Linsey Davis pronounced in introducing her on-the-subway interview with him. ABC News is owned by Disney. This guy can’t break 50 percent in a poll, the election hasn’t happened yet, and it’s already “the cusp of a historic win”?
She sounds not like an independent journalist, but like a Mamdani campaign operative.
“I’m just struck by the disparity, I have to go back again to, you know, the gentleman who’s homeless on this car that we are sitting on. And I was reading a report today that billionaires are flooding their money to try to make sure you don’t win, because there is a concern that you’re gonna increase their taxes, that that will be the way that you provide the free bus services, the free childcare, etc. What is the solution, there is such a disparity in this country?”
Mamdani’s answer, in part, “That man’s home are those seats,” was another example in his pattern of speaking English awkwardly.
Another not-exactly-Mike Wallace-type question from Davis: “What do you think it is about you, about your message, that resonates so much with the young?”
Davis got slightly more skeptical once Mamdani got off the subway and into the tv studio, but she didn’t follow up or really press Mamdani. “What do you think is the biggest misconception about you?” she asked at one point.
I’ve been making fun of Mamdani’s arrogance for likening himself to President Franklin Roosevelt and to Martin Luther King, but on Comedy Central, a network now controlled by Bari Weiss’s new boss David Ellison, host Jon Stewart went so far as to liken Mamdani to Jackie Robinson. “I wish you all the best. Honestly, I think any New Yorker who looks at someone getting an opportunity, who’s representing communities that have not been as represented, a Muslim, a young person, a progressive, a Democratic socialist, there are so many different communities that are looking to you. And this, I hate to put it on you, as bit of a Jackie Robinson moment. And I know that that probably wields some weight, but man, oh, man, what an exciting opportunity, and I wish you the best.”
Leave it to Jon Stewart to liken Mamdani, an advocate of the bigoted movement to boycott, divest, and sanction Israel, to Jackie Robinson, who triumphed against bigotry by breaking the color barrier in baseball with the Brooklyn Dodgers. What an inapt comparison.
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Jon Stewart is a brilliant comedian, but politically he's an arrested adolescent.
You report that Larry Ellison has an elegant mind.
I hope you will report what he said or wrote that evidences that elegance