Should Fed be worried if Donald Trump becomes president?
Should Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen be worried about life under a President Donald Trump?
Trump is looking more and more like the potential Republican presidential nominee after his landslide victory in the Nevada caucuses on Tuesday.
And just two days ago, Trump tweeted that he thinks the Fed should be audited. This is something that fellow Republican candidate Ted Cruz supports as well as former candidate Rand Paul.
Trump chided Cruz in his tweet for missing a Senate vote on an “Audit the Fed” bill in January. The bill failed 53-44.
That legislation was proposed by Paul. Republican candidate Marco Rubio and Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders both voted in favor of it.
Many Republicans believe that all of the Fed’s actions, including its monetary policy statements, should be audited by the Government Accountability Office.
Currently, just the Fed’s financial statements are subject to a review. They are done by the accounting firm Deloitte. Those statements are available for anyone to view on the Fed’s website.
Trump’s tweet was the first time he specifically came out in favor of a full audit of the Fed. Could an audit make the Fed great again? Hmm.
Unsurprisingly, the Fed — which acts independently from the White House and Congress — is not in favor of such a plan.
Former Fed chair Ben Bernanke argued in January that an audit raises the risk that “reviews and recommendations concerning individual monetary policy decisions would provide a vehicle for members of Congress to apply political pressure on the Fed.”
But Trump actually has already accused the Fed of being too political.
In an interview with The Hill in October, Trump said Yellen was keeping interest rates low so President Obama “doesn’t want to have a recession-slash-depression during his administration.”
That interview took place before the Fed raised rates for the first time in nine years in December. But rates remain extremely low.
Trump has repeatedly expressed concerns that the stock market is a bubble waiting to burst because of Fed policies.
