Tariffs Leave Central Banks Out in the Cold
They are, for now, not the most important voices in the global economy. That’s a worrisome shift.
Central banks have been upstaged by Trump’s tariff chaos.
Photographer: Michael Nagle/BloombergDonald Trump has set about breaking the post-1945 trading system. He’s also remaking who rules the airwaves, and central banks have been pushed into a secondary role. While the shift may be temporary, it’s notable.
They may well be left to clean up the mess Trump has created with tariffs, but for now it's comments from the US president that matter most, not those from Jerome Powell, Christine Lagarde or Kazuo Ueda. Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve, didn’t talk or act like a man in a hurry when he spoke to a conference of business journalists a few days ago. In some ways, the more interesting things he said were why he wears purple ties — he likes the color, its safely nonpartisan, and, once he started wearing them, he dared not change the habit for fear of giving a false signal — and his fondness for the Grateful Dead. (He ranked the band’s American Beauty album highly.)