Trump locking horns with Federal Reserve is just empty bluster

Editor's note: US President Donald Trump has openly expressed his discontent five times with the Federal Reserve's decision to raise the interest rates in December. But the Federal Reserve will not bow to Trump's pressure, which largely stems from his need to beautify the economic data before the midterm elections next month. Zhang Jingwei, a researcher with The Charhar Institute, in his column published by the Beijing Youth Daily commented:

The Federal Reserve predicts that the inflation rate will stay around 2 percent after the adjustment, fighting back against the Trump administration's exaggeration of the inflation risks.

The dramatic fall of the US stock market last week, despite being only temporary, must have reaffirmed the Trump administration's concern that the pending interest rate raise in December, the fourth this year, will affect the ostensible prosperity of the economy that it has long boasted as being its achievements.

The interest rate hike will predictably absorb certain amounts of capital into the financial sector that has been released by the administration's tax cut policies, as well as some investment extracted from the painstaking trade frictions it initiated that would otherwise have gone to manufacturing industries.

The competition between industrial capital and financial capital has always been a game between the industry and Wall Street. Although the administration has done a good job in supporting the former, the Wall Street has seldom lost in the competition to attract capital.

The diverting of capital from the real economy to the financial sector pulls the rug from under the manufacturing industries, employment market and consumption, the sectors whose data are key to helping the Republicans in the midterm elections.

The Trump administration replaced Janet Yellen with Republican Jerome Powell as head of the Fed, in a bid to serve its political needs. But that has not worked.

The Fed is an independent agency that bases its decisions on the fundamentals of the economy, not political interests, and attaches more importance to maintaining the continuity of monetary policies.

The upping of interest rates bids farewell to the quantitative easing policies launched after the financial crisis and this is a collective decision of both the doves and hawks factions in the Fed aimed at normalizing monetary policies.

That the White House has little say over the financial sector increases the uncertainties of its controversial trade and industrial policies, whose success entails strong supports from the financial industries.