Trump to announce Federal Reserve chair pick Friday after meeting Kevin Warsh
WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump said on Thursday he intends to announce his pick to replace Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell on Friday, with speculation intensifying that the nod will go to former Fed Governor Kevin Warsh.
“I’ll be announcing the Fed chair tomorrow morning,” Trump said at the Kennedy Center on Thursday, in response to a question.
The pick is “a person that won’t be too surprising to people. A lot of people think that this is somebody that could have been there a few years ago. It’s going to be somebody that is very respected, somebody that’s known to everybody in the financial world.”
Bloomberg News later reported that the White House is preparing for Trump to nominate Warsh, citing people familiar with the matter.
Warsh went to the White House for a meeting with Trump on Thursday, according to one source familiar with the matter.
A second source, briefed on the discussion, said the former Fed governor impressed Trump, adding that nothing was final until Trump announced his pick.
Trump wants the Fed to cut interest rates deeply. His escalating pressure on Powell and the Fed for cuts has given rise to the possibility that Powell might remain at the Fed beyond May to try to safeguard the Fed from further political pressure. Powell’s separate term as a member of the Board of Governors runs to 2028.
The Fed, which cut rates three times in 2025, left its benchmark interest rate unchanged in the 3.50 percent-3.75 percent range after the end of a two-day policy meeting on Wednesday. Trump says the rate should be two to three percentage points lower, a level historically consistent with a stalled or faltering economy. The economy grew at a 4.4 percent annualized rate in the third quarter, according to Commerce Department data. Over the course of the Trump administration’s months-long search for Powell’s successor, the president has been seen to favor different candidates, even as he has ramped up his campaign to exert influence over the Fed, whose independence from political pressure is seen as key to its ability to control inflation. In recent months Trump has tried to fire a Fed governor in a case now before the Supreme Court, and his Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation into Powell over cost overruns for renovations at the Fed’s headquarters in Washington — a move the Fed chief has called out as a “pretext” to pressure him over monetary policy.
