White House senior advisor Jared Kushner on Thursday praised Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell for his leadership of the central bank’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, CNBC reports. “Look, you really see what people are made of in times of crisis and I think that Chairman Powell has really stepped up to the plate, and he’s done a lot of the right things to make sure that the market was able to get through the crisis,” Kushner said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”President Donald Trump has been a fierce critic of Powell and the Fed over their approach to monetary policy, saying last fall they had “no ‘guts,’ no sense, no vision!” On March 14, Trump, who appointed Powell, said he was “not happy” with the Fed over its response to the burgeoning coronavirus pandemic. “I think they’re following not leading, and we should be leading,” Trump said then. Just a day later, in an emergency move, the Fed announced it was slashing its benchmark interest rate to near zero, where it has stayed since, kick-starting a series of actions designed to shore up financial markets that had been rocked by the global health crisis. The Fed followed on March 17 with a program to help businesses acquire short-term funding and then on March 23, it unleashed an unprecedented basket of programs that included its first-ever pledge to buy corporate bonds.

Source: The Standard August 27, 2020 14:20 UTC