Bill Dudley, Columnist

The Fed Shouldn’t Enable Donald Trump

The central bank should refuse to play along with an economic disaster in the making.

August 27, 2019 at 6:00 AM EDT

Bill Dudley, a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, served as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York from 2009 to 2018. He is the chair of the Bretton Woods Committee, and has been a nonexecutive director at Swiss bank UBS since 2019.

Economic threat.
Photographer: Ludovic Marin/AFP/Getty Images

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U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war with China keeps undermining the confidence of businesses and consumers, worsening the economic outlook. This manufactured disaster-in-the-making presents the Federal Reserve with a dilemma: Should it mitigate the damage by providing offsetting stimulus, or refuse to play along?

If the ultimate goal is a healthy economy, the Fed should seriously consider the latter approach.

Before it’s here, it’s on the Bloomberg Terminal

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