Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell (left) and Fed Vice Chair Philip N. Jefferson participate in the committee’s Jan. 30-31 meeting at the William McChesney Martin Jr. Building in Washington, D.C. Federal Reserve photo
Americans’ bank accounts are safe despite the Trump administration’s shutdown of a consumer financial regulatory agency, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said Tuesday.
Powell, testifying before the Senate Banking Committee, said “bank accounts overall across the economy are safe” and backed by government deposit insurance. Powell’s comments followed partisan comments from Republican and Democratic senators regarding the Trump administration’s order over the weekend for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to end all of its supervisory and rule-making work.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts who pushed for its creation of the CFPB in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and recession, said, “I’d be really worried about doing business with a giant bank when there’s no cop on the beat.”
Powell, meanwhile, received little scrutiny from senators about the Fed’s interest-rate policy, which has contributed to higher borrowing costs but has also been credited for helping bring down inflation.
And while several senators flagged the spike in inflation that followed the pandemic, Powell faced little questioning about when the Fed believes it could return inflation – now at 2.6 percent, according to the Fed’s preferred measure called the measure of personal income and outlays – to its 2 percent target.
Sen. John Kennedy, a Republican from Louisiana, praised Powell and the Fed for bringing down inflation from a 7.2 percent peak in June 2022. Kennedy noted that many economists had forecast that the Fed’s steep rate hikes in 2022 and 2023 would cause a recession. Yet, instead, the economy has continued to expand.
“The fact is, knock on wood, we have experienced a soft landing,” Kennedy said. Fed officials “deserve credit” for that, he added.
New Report Shows Inflation Rebound
A different measure of inflation, the consumer price index, spiked increased 3 percent in January from a year ago, Wednesday’s report from the Labor Department showed, up from 2.9 percent the previous month. It has increased from a 3 1/2 year low of 2.4 percent in September.
Inflation often jumps in January as many companies raise their prices at the beginning of the year, though the government’s seasonal adjustment process is supposed to filter out those effects. January’s reading doesn’t account for any of the tariffs that President Donald Trump has recently announced, which economists say should push up prices on imports from China and anything made with steel or aluminum.
Excluding the volatile food and energy categories, core consumer prices rose 3.3 percent in January compared with a year ago, up from 3.2 percent in December. Economists closely watch core prices because they can provide a better read of inflation’s future path.
“The hotter than expected CPI confirms investors’ anxiety regarding too-hot inflation that will keep the Fed on the sidelines,” said Sameer Samana, head of global equities and real assets at Wells Fargo Investment Institute.
Powell largely sought to avoid responding when asked about the potential impact of additional tariffs, which Trump has proposed, on inflation and the Fed’s key rate, which is currently at about 4.3 percent, down from a two-decade high of 5.3 percent last year.
Powell instead underscored his previous comments that with the economy generally healthy the Fed can afford to wait and see how the economy evolves and whether tariffs affect growth and inflation before making any further rate cuts. The Fed cut its key rate three times last year, but last month left it unchanged.
“We do not need to be in a hurry to adjust our policy stance,” Powell said in the first of two days of testimony on Capitol Hill.
Warren Presses Powell on CFPB
Powell was quickly thrust into the partisan turmoil surrounding Trump’s flurry of executive orders and the efforts of billionaire Elon Musk, through the Department of Government Efficiency, to slash government programs.
Warren, who repeatedly referred to “co-president Musk,” also urged Powell to maintain the Fed’s support for the CFPB, which gets its funding from the Fed.
“Do not make the Federal Reserve an accomplice to this illegal act, and forever sully the reputation of the Fed,” Warren said.
Republican senators, however, downplayed the impact of dismantling the CFPB. The bureau has sought to cap overdraft fees, ban junk fees, and says it has returned $20 billion to consumers since its inception.
Sen. Pete Ricketts, a Republican from Nebraska, said that state agencies can still provide consumers with regulatory protections.
“To say that nobody is out there looking after consumers is inaccurate and we ought not to try and scare consumers right now,” Ricketts said.
Officials Signal Rate New Cut Far Less Likely
Last week, comments by many Fed officials – as well as a decline in the unemployment rate – suggested the odds of a rate cut anytime soon have dwindled.
Fewer cuts could translate into a longer period of elevated mortgage rates and higher costs to borrow money for everything from autos to credit cards. Still, mortgage rates are closely tied to the yield on the 10-year Treasury note, which can move independently of the Fed’s actions.
Last Friday, Fed governor Adriana Kugler said that the labor market was “stable” and that “gives us a little bit of time to make some decisions.”
“The cautious and the prudent step is to hold the [Fed’s key] rate where it is for some time,” Kugler said.
The government said last Friday that employers added a solid number of jobs last month while the unemployment rate ticked down for the second straight month to 4 percent, historically quite low. Hiring in November and December was revised much higher.
The jobs report “bolsters our confidence that the Fed cutting cycle is over,” economists at Bank of America wrote in a note Friday.
