While the Trump administration enthusiastically embraces disruptive digital assets and deregulation, it is at the same time undertaking an unprecedented assault on the foundations of America’s traditional policymaking order.
Under the banner of boosting growth, the president has been threatening to fire Powell and other top Fed officials in a bid to curb the central banking independence that has underpinned America’s economic foundations for over half a century.
For the past few decades, the meetings in Jackson Hole against the backdrop of Wyoming’s rugged mountains have come to embody the power and prestige of central bankers, with their debates on monetary policy transmission, quantitative easing and inflation dynamics.
But the economists listening to Powell at the Jackson Lake Lodge, which has been battling an influx of bats in recent weeks, are aware that the ascendancy of the technocrats is in danger of being thrown dramatically into reverse.
“When I speak to economists, they’re dispirited,” says Glenn Hubbard, a chair of the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers under George W Bush, citing the broad discontent among many Americans with experts. “They know economic policy lost a very important thread with the public.”
Hubbard, now a professor at Columbia University, adds: “My fear is that if they don’t pick up that thread, the populist frenzy is only going to get worse.”