Federal Reserve last week kept the benchmark rates unchanged during its first FOMC meeting of 2026.
- Trump said that he thinks his Fed nominee Kevin Warsh understands he wants to lower rates.
- He said Warsh would not have gotten a job had he said he wanted to raise rates.
- The President has called for rate cuts several times since taking the oath in January 2025.
U.S. President Donald Trump said he has ‘not much doubt’ that interest rates will be lowered, a move he has been pressuring the Federal Reserve to make for months.
Trump said that he thinks his Fed nominee Kevin Warsh understands he wants to lower rates, further adding that he would not have gotten a job had he said he wanted to raise rates.
“I think he (Kevin) wants to anyway, I mean if he came in and said I want to raise he wouldn't have gotten the job,” Trump said.
The President has called for rate cuts several times since taking the oath in January 2025. However, Fed Chair Jerome Powell and the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) have only delivered three 25-basis-point cuts so far.
Warsh As Nominee
Last week, Trump announced he had officially nominated Warsh to succeed Powell, the current chair of the Federal Reserve.
Trump has previously said he nominated Warsh partly because the former Fed governor agrees that key borrowing rates in the country should be lower. The president has been urging Powell, whose term will end in mid-May, to lower interest rates further.
The Fed chair, however, does not have unilateral control of the interest rates set by the central bank. The interest rates are decided by the Federal Open Market Committee, which is made up of 12 members, including seven permanent governors and a rotating slate of four regional reserve bank presidents and the president of the New York Fed.
Rates Unchanged
The Federal Reserve held its benchmark interest rates steady in its first policy meeting of 2026, on the back of encouraging macroeconomic data. It, however, flagged that inflation was somewhat elevated.
U.S. equities were mixed in Wednesday’s mid-day trade. At the time of writing, the SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY), which tracks the S&P 500 index, was down nearly 1%, the Invesco QQQ Trust ETF (QQQ) slumped 2.4%, and the SPDR Dow Jones Industrial Average ETF Trust (DIA) edged higher 0.09%.
Retail sentiment around the S&P 500 ETF on Stocktwits was in the ‘bearish’ territory.
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