By Canadian Press

Trump to nominate Stephen Moore for Federal Reserve board

Mar 22, 2019 | 11:36 AM

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said Friday that he will nominate Stephen Moore, a conservative economic analyst, to fill a vacancy on the Federal Reserve’s seven-member board.

Moore served as an economic adviser to Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign, helping to draft Trump’s tax cut plan.

The president has been harshly critical of the Fed’s rate increases last year even after the central bank this week announced that it foresees no hikes this year. Moore, who formerly served as chief economist for the conservative Heritage Foundation, has also been critical of policy moves made by Chairman Jerome Powell, who was hand-picked by Trump to be Fed chairman.

An ardent defender of tax cuts, Moore is close to Larry Kudlow, the director of the White House National Economic Council. The two collaborated in shaping the tax overhaul that Trump signed into law at the end of 2017, leading to changes that largely favoured tax cuts for corporations and wealthier Americans with the intention of spurring investment and faster growth.

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Trump in his first two years in office had been able to reshape the central bank. He nominated four of the current five members, and he chose Powell, a Republican who was chosen for the Fed board by President Barack Obama, to succeed Janet Yellen as chairman. If confirmed by the Senate, Moore would fill one of two vacancies on the Fed’s board.

The selection of Moore marks a deviation from Trump’s previous selections for the Fed’s board to a figure with a more conservative ideology. He stressed monetary policy in a March editorial in The Wall Street Journal that estimated that Fed policies had cut real growth by as much as 1.5 percentage points in the past six months. Moore proposed that the Fed set short-term rates with the goal of stabilizing volatile commodity prices, rather than focusing on targeting overall inflation of 2 per cent.

This approach, Moore has argued, would help spur economic growth in excess of 3 per cent, instead of the longer-run average of 1.9 per cent that Fed officials forecast.

Moore has frequently praised the administration on television and co-authored the 2018 book “Trumponomics” with Art Laffer, who pioneered the Republican doctrine that lower tax rates would accelerate economic growth in ways that could minimize debt. Federal debt has jumped since Trump’s overhaul to the tax code, surging nearly 77 per cent through the first four months of fiscal 2019 compared to the same year prior.

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AP White House reporter Deb Riechman contributed to this report.

Catherine Lucey, Martin Crutsinger And Josh Boak, The Associated Press