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      Trump, Jay Powell and a Potential Fight over the Fed’s Future

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      As Trump allies including Elon Musk endorse ending the Federal Reserve’s independence, the central bank’s chair is reportedly ready to go to court to fight back.Jay Powell appears ready to defend Fed independence, and his job.Kent Nishimura/Getty ImagesA battle over the Fed’s future Donald Trump’s threat to exert more say over the Fed or even fire Jay Powell, the chair of the central bank, has alarmed some on Wall Street. But the president-elect’s effort took on added weight in recent days, after Elon Musk endorsed a push to erode the Fed’s independence.The fight shows how the future of the Fed could remain high on the agenda, and how far Musk’s influence — and the role of X as place for announcing policy positions — could extend across government.The Fed has its foes. Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, introduced a bill in June to abolish the central bank, accusing it of being an “economic manipulator that has directly contributed to the financial instability many Americans face today.”Lee said on X that he wants to see the Fed under the president’s control — a view that Musk backed.Powell could turn to the courts to challenge any White House attempt to exert more control, according to The Wall Street Journal’s Nick Timiraos. Trump appointed Powell in 2017 but flirted with removing him shortly afterward. Powell held onto his job, but was ready for a fight if Trump made a move, Timiraos writes:Powell told then-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin that he would fight his removal if sought by the president, according to people familiar with the matter. Trump was upset the Fed was raising interest rates against his wishes.For Powell, the unsavory prospect of a legal showdown — one he might have to pay for out of his own pocket — was imperative to preserve the ability of future Fed chairs to serve without the threat of being removed over a policy dispute.Powell has made it clear that the president doesn’t have the authority to remove a Fed chair. Last week, he said he wouldn’t step down if Trump asked him to do so after the central bank lowered borrowing costs by a quarter point. Removing him, he added, was “not permitted under the law.”A 1977 law gave Congress more oversight of the Fed, but enshrined the institution’s independence on policy.The central bank’s ability to set monetary policy without political influence is a core tenet for markets and the economy. The Fed also has an outsized influence through its freedom to buy and sell securities, like Treasury notes and bonds, as it looks to bring more liquidity to trading.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Democrats Who Won

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      We’re covering this year’s successful Democratic campaigns.In a very bad year for their party, some Democrats still figured out how to win tough races.Marcy Kaptur seems to have won a 22nd term in Congress despite representing an Ohio district that has voted for Donald Trump three straight times. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington State was re-elected in a House district where Trump thumped Kamala Harris. Jared Golden of Maine is leading in a similarly red district. In Senate races, Tammy Baldwin (Wisconsin), Ruben Gallego (Arizona), Jacky Rosen (Nevada) and Elissa Slotkin (Michigan) prevailed or are leading in states that Trump won.How? These Democrats ran on strikingly similar themes — part progressive, part moderate, part conservative. Above all, they avoided talking down to voters and telling them they were wrong to be frustrated about the economy, immigration and post-pandemic disorder. “The fundamental mistake people make is condescension,” Gluesenkamp Perez told my colleague Annie Karni after the election.In today’s newsletter, I’ll focus on three issues that helped these candidates win.1. ImmigrationMany Democrats have been in denial about immigration. Some initially argued that immigration didn’t soar under President Biden. Others claimed Biden’s policies weren’t the cause. Still others dismissed concerns about strained social services and crowded schools as Republican misinformation. (Many Republicans, to be clear, did tell lies about immigrants.)But Biden did spark a huge immigration wave. He encouraged more people to come to the U.S. and loosened entry rules. Sure enough, immigration surged to its highest levels in many decades.Source: Congressional Budget Office | By The New York TimesIf anyone doubted Biden’s role, more proof came this year when he tightened policy, and immigration plummeted.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Revisiting the Harlem Renaissance

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      Why the era still resonates a century later.I’m a Brooklyn girl, but I’m low-key obsessed with the Harlem Renaissance. I’ve written a book about the era and taught its literature at universities. I can, and often do, spend whole weekends rereading Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, listening to Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, thumbing through books featuring artwork by Aaron Douglas and Augusta Savage.But what brings me back to the Renaissance again and again is the way it changed this country. When the movement started a century ago, the United States was finally creating our own distinctly original culture — songs and dances, paintings and novels. We were looking less to Europe as a model of creativity. And in this moment — the 1920s, in New York City, both uptown and downtown — we become more wholly American.This year, a team of Times journalists marked the 100th anniversary of the Harlem Renaissance with a series examining its vibrant history.A 1925 breakfast party for Langston Hughes.Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public LibraryWe began with a little-known dinner party that took place on March 21, 1924, an unprecedented interracial gathering that included such luminaries as W.E.B. Du Bois, Carl Van Doren and Alain Locke, as well as up-and-coming writers like Gwendolyn Bennett and Countee Cullen.Even today, in New York, this kind of gathering is rare. The purpose of the dinner was to marry talent to opportunity, connecting writers with editors and critics, and it was a wild success: In the decade after the dinner, Renaissance writers published more than 40 volumes of fiction, nonfiction and poetry, works that transformed the literary landscape of our nation. You can read about the dinner party (and the friendships, feuds and affairs that it launched) in this piece.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Powell, Fed Chair, Will Likely Face Heavy Pressure From Trump

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      The chair of the Federal Reserve made clear he would not resign, even under pressure. But pressure from the White House is likely, market watchers say.Jay Powell, the Fed chair, with President Trump during more tranquil times in 2017.Carlos Barria/ReutersPowell pushes back Jay Powell and the Fed may have pulled off the improbable soft landing in taming inflation while not crashing the economy into recession, proving many a Wall Street naysayer wrong.But an even bigger wildcard looms in another Donald Trump presidency — what Trump 2.0 might mean for interest rates, Fed independence and the Fed chair’s own job.That tension burst into the open at the Fed’s news conference on Thursday. The usually dry event had moments of high drama that nearly overshadowed the decision to cut the benchmark lending rate by a quarter percentage point. Powell delivered a forceful “no” when asked by Victoria Guida of Politico if he would consider resigning if Trump asked.He delivered a more emphatic response when pressed by another reporter on whether the president had the legal authority to fire him. “Not permitted under the law,” Powell said.Trump has made waves by saying that a president should have a say in rates policy. And suggestions have circulated from inside the president-elect’s camp that he would sideline Powell if re-elected — something Trump flirted with during his first term after appointing Powell in 2017.The S&P 500 advanced as the news conference wore on, closing at another record, and Treasury bonds also rallied.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A November Surprise That’s Jostling the Markets

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      The dollar, Treasury yields and crypto currencies have fallen, reversing some elements of the so-called Trump trade after an unexpected poll result. In the race’s final hours, a poll reminds the markets of the power of women voters.Caroline Gutman for The New York TimesDown to the wire Investors on Monday appear to be unwinding bets on the so-called Trump trade. In a major reversal, bonds have rallied and the dollar and crypto currencies have dipped in the race’s final hours.One explanation is a surprising new poll that showed Vice President Kamala Harris, powered in part by support from women and older voters, edging ahead in deep-red Iowa — a finding that’s also led to a tightening of Donald Trump’s lead in political prediction markets.Why the change of heart? The highly regarded Ann Selzer/Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa poll that was published on Saturday gave Harris a three-point advantage over Trump in the Hawkeye State, a Republican stronghold. “It’s hard for anybody to say they saw this coming,” Selzer said.Some urged caution about the poll. The Economist questioned whether the small sample size in Selzer’s poll made it a good predictor of what might happen in other states. And the Trump campaign pointed to another Iowa poll out this weekend that showed the former president with a 10-point lead over Harris.But Michael McDonald, a politics professor at the University of Florida who runs a vote-tracking site, pointed to similar dynamics in a recent Kansas poll.The Selzer poll has roiled the political betting markets. Following its publication, Trump’s odds of victory fell on platforms including Polymarket, after they had climbed in recent weeks, in tandem with crypto and other elements of the Trump trade.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      20/20 Foresight

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      We’re covering the strategic risks that Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are taking.Once an election is over, hindsight can make the winner’s strategy look perfect and the loser’s seem doomed. As my colleague Jonathan Swan said recently on “The Daily”: “The winning campaign, everything they did was genius, and then the losing campaign are just a bunch of idiots. And the truth is that neither is necessarily true.”The truth instead tends to be that presidential campaigns make strategic decisions that come with benefits as well as costs. And those decisions aren’t guaranteed to succeed or fail.In today’s newsletter, I’ll analyze a core strategy that Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have each pursued. After Tuesday, I suspect we will come to see both as crucial, albeit in different ways.Harris’s cautionOn paper, Harris is the underdog. In rich countries around the world, incumbents are doing badly; the ruling parties in Australia, Britain, Germany, Italy and Japan have all recently lost power. In the U.S., President Biden has a 40 percent approval rating, and less than 30 percent of adults are satisfied with the country’s direction.Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, points out that voters appear eager for change and specifically seem skeptical of progressivism. (I recommend his essay on the subject.)Given this backdrop, Harris has run a strikingly cautious campaign. Game theorists would describe it as a low-variance strategy. She and her aides avoided moves that might have gone very well — and might have gone very poorly.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Classical Music Discovery

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      An unknown waltz by Chopin has been found. As The Times’s classical music reporter, I don’t often get “news” from long-dead composers.But I recently learned that an unknown waltz by the eminent composer Chopin, written nearly 200 years ago, had been discovered in the vault of the Morgan Library & Museum in New York. It was unearthed in a collection of memorabilia, alongside postcards signed by Picasso and letters from Brahms and Tchaikovsky.We published our exclusive story on the discovery today. And here’s a special treat: The superstar pianist Lang Lang recorded the waltz for The Times. You can watch his performance here.The story of the long-lost waltz starts at the Morgan on a late-spring day, when the curator and composer Robinson McClellan came across an unusual musical manuscript. The piece was moody and melancholic, and a conspicuous name was written across the top: Chopin.McClellan took a photo on his iPhone so he could play the piece back at home on his electric piano. He also sent a photo to Jeffrey Kallberg, a Chopin scholar at the University of Pennsylvania.“My jaw dropped,” Kallberg told me. “I knew I had never seen this before.”In September, the Morgan’s experts invited me to view the manuscript, which they had authenticated by analyzing the paper, ink and musical style. It was much smaller than I had imagined — a pockmarked scrap about the size of an index card. Chopin had famously tiny penmanship, and he packed a lot into this little piece.As an amateur pianist, I grew up adoring Chopin’s music. His waltzes, nocturnes, ballades and mazurkas are a dreamy realm of nostalgia, longing, suffering and bliss. He is still one of music’s most beloved figures. (His heart, pickled in a jar of alcohol, is encased in a church in Warsaw.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Elections Affect Our Shopping

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      We explore why consumers tend to get skittish about major purchases ahead of a general election. In the weeks leading up to a general election, consumers tend to get skittish about major purchases like houses, cars, weddings and investments. After the election, regardless of the outcome, they open up their wallets and shop again.It’s the election shopping slump.As the presidential election draws near, my colleague Jordyn Holman and I wanted to see if the trend was holding true this year as well. In a new article that published this morning, we find that it is.Wedding planners told us that newly engaged couples were too distracted to book events for next year. Financial advisers said their clients were keeping their assets in cash. Car dealers said shoppers were staying on the sidelines.In today’s newsletter, I’ll explain what drives this behavior, and why it’s not unique to this election cycle.The pivot pointThere are a lot of reasons Americans are reluctant to buy homes right now. Inflation drove mortgage interest rates to a 20-year high, and a lack of housing stock kept prices from falling, exacerbating an affordability crisis. But even in years when the housing market was more amenable, buyers got nervous before they went to the polls.Jonathan Miller, a real estate appraiser, looked back at two decades of home sales in Los Angeles, Manhattan and Miami and saw a pattern: Sales dipped in the second half of even years and bounced back in odd years. “Election Day is the pivot point,” he said. “It’s like the foot is taken off the brake after the election.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More