National Economic Council (NEC) Director Kevin Hassett on Sunday touted the market response to a Bloomberg report last week suggesting Hassett is broadly considered the front-runner among candidates to replace Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.
The president’s top economic adviser, in an interview on CBS News’s “Face the Nation,” called the Bloomberg report a “rumor” and said he is “really honored to be amongst a group of really great candidates.”
But Hassett cited the positive market reaction as a response to news that President Trump is close to picking Powell’s replacement.
“The thing that I was most impressed about this week when that story leaked was that really — I think the news for markets was that President Trump is close to announcing a new person who is going to replace Jay Powell,” Hassett said in the interview.
“And if you look at the market response to that, it was very, very positive,” he continued. “We had a great Treasury auction. Interest rates went down. And so, I think that the American people could expect President Trump to pick somebody who’s going to help them, you know, have cheaper car loans and easier access to mortgages at lower rates.”
“And that’s what we saw in the market response to the rumor about me, which, you know, is probably about as valuable as the rumor about the health care policy that we just talked about,” he added, referring to conflicting reports about plans from the White House to extend health care subsidies that Hassett said were “confidential and pre-decisional” and leaked before they were finalized.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who has been conducting interviews to find Powell’s replacement, said last week that Trump could announce his decision by the Christmas holiday.
