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federal reserve
Fed Interest Rate Cut Shows Trump Agenda 'Pushing Our Economy to the Brink': Economist
"Working families are paying the price" for the president's "reckless" policies, said Groundwork Collaborative's Alex Jacquez.
Oct 29, 2025
As Americans face tariff-related price hikes, surging health insurance premiums, and fallout from the government shutdown, from missed paychecks to no food assistance, the Federal Reserve on Wednesday announced its second interest rate cut of the year.
"Job gains have slowed this year, and the unemployment rate has edged up but remained low through August," the US central bank said in a statement about the Federal Open Market Committee cutting the benchmark interest rate by a quarter of a percentage point to 3.75-4%, its lowest level in three years. "Inflation has moved up since earlier in the year and remains somewhat elevated."
When the Fed slashed the federal funds rate last month, economist Alex Jacquez warned that it would "do little to address" the "economic turmoil" created by President Donald Trump. On Wednesday, the former Obama administration official, who is now chief of policy and advocacy at the think tank Groundwork Collaborative, again took aim at the US leader.
"The Fed's decision only confirms what Americans already know—the economy is slowing, job growth has stalled, prices keep climbing, and consumers are pulling back because they're out of options," Jacquez said in a statement. "Trump's reckless economic agenda is pushing our economy to the brink, and working families are paying the price."
US House Budget Committee Ranking Member Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.) similarly said in a Wednesday statement that "today's rate cut is yet another warning sign about the sorry state of Donald Trump's economy."
"Nearly half of all states are now in or near recession, inflation is climbing, and the labor market is losing strength," Boyle noted. "This is all a direct result of Trump's reckless tariff taxes and his chaotic economic agenda."
"At the same time, working families are facing the largest spike in health insurance premiums in our nation's history," he stressed. "I'll keep fighting to lower costs, protect affordable healthcare, and make sure every American has access to a good-paying job.”
Rohit Chopra, who directed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau during the Biden administration, before Trump gutted the agency, was also critical of the Republican president on Wednesday.
"While he is not in the room to vote on Fed interest rates, President Trump's shadow looms large over the Federal Reserve and many members seem eager to please him," Chopra said. "While Gov. Lisa Cook is fighting back, markets seem to understand that the Fed's decision-making will be heavily shaped by the whims of the White House."
Trump is trying to oust Cook from the Fed's Board of Governors, which her lawyers call "unprecedented and illegal." The US Supreme Court is set to hear arguments in her case in January; in the meantime, earlier this month, the justices allowed her to remain in her post.
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As Planet Burns, US Banking Agencies Ditch Climate Risk Rules
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell recently warned that due to climate disasters, "there will be regions of the country where you can’t get a mortgage, there won’t be ATMs, banks won’t have branches."
Oct 17, 2025
Federal regulators have rescinded a set of guidelines for large banking institutions to consider the financial dangers of the climate crisis when making decisions about business strategy, risk management, and strategic planning.
On Thursday, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), and the Federal Reserve Board announced that they would immediately withdraw their interagency Principles for Climate-Related Financial Risk Management for Large Financial Institutions, a framework that required financial institutions with $100 billion or more in assets to consider climate risks.
The guidelines were first issued in 2023, which was, at the time, the hottest year on record. That year, the US experienced a record number of weather and climate-related disasters—including a massive drought across the south and Midwest, historic wildfires in Hawaii, and major flooding events across the country—that caused at least $92 billion worth of damage.
In October of that year, Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell said: "Banks need to understand, and appropriately manage, their material risks, including the financial risks of climate change."
The OCC, meanwhile, explained that "financial institutions are likely to be affected by both the physical risks and transition risks associated with climate change." This included both the risks to the safety of people and property "from acute, climate-related events, such as hurricanes, wildfires, floods, and heatwaves, and chronic shifts in climate," as well as changes due to "shifts in policy... that would be part of a transition to a lower carbon economy."
But these concerns have not carried over to the administration of President Donald Trump, who recently referred to climate change as a "con" and has sought to purge the federal government of any acknowledgement of the scientific consensus that it is being caused by human fossil fuel usage, which he has moved to aggressively expand.
In a joint release Thursday, the agencies said they "do not believe principles for managing climate-related financial risk are necessary because the agencies' existing safety and soundness standards require all supervised institutions to have effective risk management commensurate with their size, complexity, and activities," adding that "all supervised institutions are expected to consider and appropriately address all material financial risks and should be resilient to a range of risks, including emerging risks."
Elyse Schupak, policy advocate with Public Citizen's climate program, criticized the withdrawal of the guidelines, calling it "an irresponsible and politically motivated move in the wrong direction."
"The increase in the frequency and severity of climate disasters and the rapidly escalating property insurance crisis mean the agencies should be working harder to understand and mitigate climate-related financial risks faced by banks and the financial system—not backtracking," she said. "Effective bank regulation requires looking squarely at all risks to supervised institutions, including climate risks, and addressing them before they have destabilizing effects. This approach, rather than politics, should guide regulator action."
The move comes as the globe is reaching the point of no return for the climate crisis. Global temperatures have already soared to between 1.3°C and 1.4°C above preindustrial levels and are expected to pass the 1.5°C threshold within the next five years, at which point many of the worst effects will become unavoidable. These effects include more frequent heatwaves, sea level increases, more frequent severe storms, and aggressive droughts.
In addition to the human toll, these entail considerable financial damage. In December 2024, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that if the Earth continues to warm at current rates, the nation's gross domestic product (GDP) will be 4% lower than if temperatures had remained stable.
It predicted that sea level rise—projected 1 to 4 feet by the turn of the century—would cause anywhere from $250 billion to $930 billion worth of losses to property owners, mortgage lenders, insurance companies, and the federal government. Other untold costs, it said, would be borne as a result of heightened mortality from heat, declines in available food and water, increased rates of illness, and forced migration due to unlivable conditions.
Testifying before Congress earlier this year, Powell noted that banks and insurance companies have been pulling out of coastal areas at risk of flooding and places prone to wildfires due to the financial risk.
State Farm had recently canceled thousands of policies in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles shortly before it was hit with massive wildfires in January. He warned that as climate change worsens, financial institutions will deem it too risky to serve large portions of the country.
"If you fast forward 10 or 15 years," Powell said, "there will be regions of the country where you can't get a mortgage, there won't be ATMs, banks won't have branches, and things like that."
Schupak said: "For the Federal Reserve, capitulation to the politics of climate denial championed by the Trump administration is a threat to both its legitimacy and efficacy, which will be hard to repair."
"Powell has admitted that the Federal Reserve has done the 'bare minimum' on climate," she continued. "Now it will do even less, putting the banks it supervises and the broader financial system at risk."
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Fed Governor Warns 'Job Growth Has Probably Been Negative' as US Labor Market Stalls
One market analyst said the US jobs market is going through "bed rot."
Oct 10, 2025
Christopher Waller, a Federal Reserve governor, warned on Friday that the US labor market at the moment is in poor shape and showing little sign of improvement.
In an interview on CNBC, Waller said that the data released by processing firm ADP earlier this month showing that the economy lost 32,000 jobs in September was "consistent with what we're starting to see with [Bureau of Labor Statistics] data."
"Job growth has probably been negative the last few months," he explained. "It doesn't look like it's doing much better. Anecdotally... I don't hear anybody with big hiring plans. All I ever hear is, 'We're not backfilling, we're not firing, we're holding off any job things.' That's the anecdotal evidence."
Fed Governor Christopher Waller: "Job growth has probably been negative the last few months. it doesn't look like it's doing much better. I don't hear anybody with big hiring plans." pic.twitter.com/aXDZPNTixq
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 10, 2025
Waller's analysis was shared by Ed Al-Hussainy, rates strategist with Columbia Threadneedle investments, who told Axios on Friday that the job market was "bed rotting," with employers reluctant to make any major hiring commitments in the face of economic uncertainty.
Al-Hussainy also warned that the current problems with the job market could "continue to get worse, until they reach a tipping point where consumption starts to degrade, and then you have another recession scare."
Earlier in the week, Fortune reported that Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics, estimated that there was "essentially no job growth" in the last month, while pointing to the Conference Board's recent report showing that US consumers haven't been this pessimistic about the labor market since the end of the Covid-19 pandemic.
"There’s no better predictor of changes in unemployment, which thus likely rose again in September," he added.
Abby McCloskey, a columnist at Bloomberg and a former economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, argued in a Friday column that the US economy had now slowed down so much that even supporters of President Donald Trump were rating it unfavorably.
"Only 44% of Republicans think the economy is excellent or good, according to new data from the Pew Research Center," McCloskey explained. "Compare this to the soaring approval of GOP voters in Trump’s first term before Covid hit—when 81% thought the economy was good."
She then noted that, despite a record-breaking stock market and stabilized inflation, voters' concerns about the economy appeared to be justified.
"Despite enormous tax cuts in this summer’s reconciliation bill and sweeping reductions to the federal workforce—things Republicans would typically cheer—tariffs and political uncertainty are taking a toll," she argued. "When a voter balances the tax cuts from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act against tariffs raising prices on everything from groceries to clothes, it feels like running just to stay in place."
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