Let’s stipulate that helping steer the world’s largest economy is rarely an easy job. It doesn’t get easier when the president some days seems to want you fired, on other days says the opposite and in between tells you how to do your job. Managing an irascible chief executive hasn’t been part of the Federal Reserve handbook since the 1970s. So how is the Fed chairman, Jerome Powell, doing? Mostly well, with some caveats, say the three economists who participated in Opinion’s round table conversation about the central bank and the economy. And what should Powell and the Federal Reserve do now? On that there was even more agreement: pretty much nothing at all. The Fed meets today and on Wednesday, when it will release its latest decision on interest rates. Among its conundrums are the screwball data. The numbers for the first few months of 2025 seem decent. The forecasts, though, are as clear as a snow leopard in a blizzard, given how the Trump administration’s tariff plan could reorder international trade and the domestic economy — if it sticks. “The best thing for the Fed over the next few months is to be behind the curve because the alternative is to risk being ahead of the wrong curve,” said the Harvard economist and former Obama administration official Jason Furman. Rebecca Patterson, formerly of J.P. Morgan and Bridgewater Associates, a huge hedge fund, said she is confident the economy will slow. “But how quickly and how much? It’s too soon to tell,” she said. “I think what we’re probably about to learn is where we are truly dependent on China,” said Oren Cass, the chief economist of American Compass, a conservative think tank. And what does the president want? “NO INFLATION, THE FED SHOULD LOWER ITS RATE!!!” he said in a social media post last week. The panelists strongly agreed that maintaining the Fed's independence was crucial to the economy’s future (“The nightmare scenario is that the Supreme Court grants the president the ability to fire everyone on the Fed,” said Furman) although they differed over how much the central bank had erred by venturing into political territory in recent years. The trio also discussed a possible successor to Powell, the significance of market volatility and the optimal number of dolls required by America’s children. Here’s what we’re focusing on today:
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