Pardon my cynicism, but it seems like many of the actions the administration is pushing are simply things they were pushing already and are using this health crisis as cudgel to help get what they want.
What we need are lower interest rates! What we need is to limit immigration from Mexico (even though the US has a higher infection rate and there isn't any talk of limiting flights from, say, England). What we need to do is silence domain experts and have communications controlled by politicians at the White House.
Maybe this rate cut is actually the right thing to do, what do I know? But I have little reason to believe it was made for the right reasons.
The administration doesn't direct interest rate policy, the FED does, within the context of the FED's mandate a rate drop isn't unexpected during an event like this.
That is how it is supposed to work. Over the past couple of years we have seen the President break with tradition and uses his megaphone to berate and belittle the fed to try and get what he wants. Of course we cannot know if the fed has ignored all that, but by appearances, the president seems to be having an influence.
To be fair, Trump has been pushing the Fed around non-stop. They basically follow his indirect orders. All for political gain at the expense of the future. It's pretty pathetic.
Rahm Emmanual was indeed initially in Obama's cabinet, but he didn't last a year. Perhaps his politics didn't fit with the tenor of that administration.
To use that quote to set up an equivalence between the two administrations is beyond the pale. I think neither Democrats nor Republicans would say the two administrations are alike.
Agreed, I think many people in the administration and at the Fed were itching to cut rates for a while, and this is the perfect excuse to do what they were already planning to do.
What we need are lower interest rates! What we need is to limit immigration from Mexico (even though the US has a higher infection rate and there isn't any talk of limiting flights from, say, England). What we need to do is silence domain experts and have communications controlled by politicians at the White House.
Maybe this rate cut is actually the right thing to do, what do I know? But I have little reason to believe it was made for the right reasons.