Trump Calls for Lower Interest Rates

Plus, Columbia’s catastrophizing

Fed Chairman Powell seen earlier this month in a screengrab from a Fed-provided video feed.

That President Trump wants interest rates lower was a point made here first back on March 14 (“Maybe Trump Is Intentionally Creating a Mini-Recession”). We followed up on March 23, quoting the Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent: “We might actually pull Treasury bill yields down by 30 to 70 basis points. Every basis point is a billion dollars a year” (“Treasury Secretary Bessent on Interest Rates, the Budget, and Growth”).

This afternoon Trump himself weighed in. “I’d like to see interest rates come down a little bit,” Trump volunteered. He wasn’t asked about interest rates. He was asked a general question about consumer confidence. He said prices of eggs and gasoline and groceries—which, in a brief example of the sort of meta-commentary that lends a postmodern feel to the whole event, he acknowledged is an “old-fashioned word”—are going down.