IMF Lagarde Defends Fed Chair on Monetary Policy

The head of the International Monetary Fund on Thursday defended Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell one day after U.S. President Donald Trump criticized the American central bank, which has been raising U.S. interest rates, as “crazy.”



“I wouldn’t associate Jay Powell with craziness,” Managing Director Christine Lagarde told CNBC in an interview. “He comes across – and members of his board – as extremely serious, solid and certainly keen to base their decisions on actual information.”

Trump made the comment in response to Wall Street’s sell-off after the S&P 500 and the Dow marked their worst losses in eight months. The slump triggered a surge of global selling that sent European stocks to a more than an 18-month low on Thursday and knocked down Asian shares.

Worries about higher borrowing costs have sparked the U.S. stock sales in recent days, while a spike in U.S. Treasury yields and solid U.S. economic data have raised concerns that the Fed may pick up the pace of its interest rate hikes.

via Reuters

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Alfonso Esparza

Alfonso Esparza

Senior Currency Analyst at Market Pulse
Alfonso Esparza specializes in macro forex strategies for North American and major currency pairs. Upon joining OANDA in 2007, Alfonso Esparza established the MarketPulseFX blog and he has since written extensively about central banks and global economic and political trends. Alfonso has also worked as a professional currency trader focused on North America and emerging markets. He has been published by The MarketWatch, Reuters, the Wall Street Journal and The Globe and Mail, and he also appears regularly as a guest commentator on networks including Bloomberg and BNN. He holds a finance degree from the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education (ITESM) and an MBA with a specialization on financial engineering and marketing from the University of Toronto.
Alfonso Esparza