Donald Trump said he’s nominating Stephen Moore, a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a long-time supporter of the president, for a seat on the Federal Reserve Board.
Trump made the announcement Friday to reporters traveling with him to Palm Beach, Florida, confirming an earlier Bloomberg News report. The president later said in a tweet that Moore is “a very respected Economist” and said he has “no doubt he will be an outstanding choice.”
Moore has emerged as an ardent critic of the Federal Reserve Board under its current chairman, Jerome Powell, who fell out of favor with Trump last year after the Fed’s rate increases. Placing him on the board may be the president’s attempt to check Powell and head off further tightening of U.S. monetary policy that Trump believes could slow economic growth before his 2020 re-election campaign.
Moore blamed the Fed for slowing the economy while championing Trump’s policies in a March 13 Journal column that he co-authored. Trump’s chief economic adviser Larry Kudlow showed the op-ed to Trump over lunch last week, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Trump remarked to Kudlow that he should have appointed Moore to be Fed chairman, the people said, and directed Kudlow to call Moore and gauge his interest in a board seat. This week, Trump called Moore himself and asked if he’d accept a nomination to the board.
In the op-ed, Moore also suggested the Fed stabilize the value of the dollar by adopting a commodity price rule. He has harshly criticized Powell and the current Fed board in other recent public remarks.
“I believe the people on the Federal Reserve Board should be thrown out for economic malpractice,” Moore said Dec. 22 on Red Apple Group chairman and chief executive John Catsimatidis’s radio show, blaming an end-of-the-year stock market swoon on the Fed’s rate hikes.
“ Janet Yellen couldn’t have been any worse than the guy he’s got in there now,” Moore said of Powell and his predecessor. “I always thought he was a bad choice. He’s been a Fed guy for many years. Donald Trump wanted to drain the swamp. The Fed is the swamp.”
Moore, who couldn’t be reached for comment after the president’s announcement, was a fierce critic of Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama. Moore predicted rising budget deficits under Obama would lead to higher interest rates and inflation, but that didn’t come true. Under Trump, the budget deficit is approaching $1 trillion a year.
Moore is a former Trump campaign adviser who helped write its economic agenda and a close friend of Kudlow. He was a senior economist on the Congressional Joint Economic Committee, served on the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal and was an economic analyst for CNN.