Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called out the Federal Reserve on Monday, blasting Chair Jerome Powell’s stewardship and demanding an institution-wide review of the central bank’s performance, bloated bureaucracy, and disturbing deviation from its core mission.
“What we need to do is examine the entire Federal Reserve institution and whether they have been successful,” Bessent said during CNBC interview. “If this were the [Federal Aviation Administration] and we were having this many mistakes, we would go back and look at why has this happened.”
Bessent specifically torched the Fed for its elitist groupthink and catastrophic predictions on tariffs and inflation.
“They were fear-mongering over tariffs, and thus far we have seen very little, if any, inflation. We’ve had great inflation numbers. So, you know, I think this idea [is] of them not being able to break out of a certain mindset. All these Ph.D.s over there, I don’t know what they do.”