Warren Calls On Fed To Halt Interest Rate Hikes As Inflation Eases

(Bloomberg) -- Senator Elizabeth Warren called on the Federal Reserve to halt interest-rate increases as the US inflation rate slid to a more than two-year low. 

“Take yes for an answer, Chair Powell, and let’s stop with the rate increases,” Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, said Wednesday in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “Balance of Power.” “Done.”

She has famously called Jerome Powell, the central bank’s chairman, a “dangerous man to be running the Fed” and voted against his renomination to the post. 

At 3% last month, consumer-price inflation is now just one-third of the level it reached a year ago, which was the highest in four decades. And the details for June were also better than expected, with key measures of underlying inflation coming in below forecasts.

‘Go Michael’ 

Warren also urged the Fed to follow through on higher capital requirements for large banks being proposed by Fed Vice Chair Michael Barr. 

“Barr is headed in the right direction. Is it enough? No. We still have a lot of problems. We have too much concentration in the banking industry,” she said. “We’re not out of the woods yet, but I feel a lot better when I read Michael Barr talking about the need to tighten down on bank regulation. Go Michael.”

Warren also complained about a push to continue consolidating smaller banks. “Anything that wipes those banks out is a bad idea,” she said, noting a hearing she held earlier Wednesday on the subject. 

Read More: Warren Calls Biden Bank Regulators’ Merger Stance ‘Wrongheaded’

“In a third of all counties in America there is no small independent bank,” Warren said. Bigger banks don’t focus on small business lending like smaller banks, she said.

Concentration Concerns

She also applauded efforts by the Federal Trade Commission taking on tough antitrust cases, and said big technology companies like Amazon.com Inc. should be broken up. She pointed out Amazon’s role as both a platform for third-party sellers and a competitor to them. 

“You can be an umpire in baseball, or you can have a team, but you don’t get to do both at the same time,” she said, referring to Amazon’s business model.

Warren said concentration in industries like defense, banking and tech stifles innovation and frequently leads to price gouging.

“I believe in the power of markets but they only work if we enforce the rules that keep competitors going rather than monopolists,” she said.

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