Washington: President Donald Trump slammed the Federal Reserve on Tuesday for "incessantly" raising interest rates and said cutting rates by a full point would make the economy surge.
In a Twitter outburst on the first day of a two-day central bank meeting to decide the course of monetary policy, Trump said, "We have the potential to go up like a rocket if we did some lowering of rates, like one point."
He said China is boosting its economy by keeping rates low, but "Our Federal Reserve has incessantly lifted interest rates, even though inflation is very low." The Fed has not raised the key rate this year and in fact signalled clearly that it will hold off on any further moves while it evaluates the US economy and is widely expected to stand firm in its decision on Wednesday.
The central bank has tightened policy nine times since December 2015, moving from zero in the aftermath of the global financial crisis to the current range of 2.25 per cent to 2.5 per cent.