Warren: Fed Chair Powell Has Got to Go — He’s Putting the ‘American Economy at Risk’

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) said Tuesday on MSNBC’s “The Last Word” that Fed Chair Jerome Powell should not be renominated because he is putting the U.S. economy in risk of another financial crisis.

O’Donnell said, “The fed chair is up. The appointment runs out next year. The president will reappoint the chair or a new one. What do you think is at stake in that question?”

Warren said, “You remember what happened in the early 2000s. That is, we had a federal reserve that was unwilling to reign the giant financial institutions. So a bit at a time, they deregulate here, they turn a blind eye there. And those financial institutions very quietly just loaded up on more and more and more and more risk until they blew up the entire economy, and the U.S. task payer was called on to bail them out. Millions of people lost their jobs. Millions of people lost their homes. Millions of people lost their savings. I came to Washington guaranteeing that will never happen again if I can help it.”

She added, “What’s happened? We have had a federal reserve chair for five years now who has demonstrated over and over again that he is not willing to reign in the big financial institutions. He has taken one regulatory step after another, small steps, but always in the same direction, and that is the direction toward weakening the regulations over the biggest financial institutions. The thing is, that’s cumulative or time, and it puts American consumers, it puts American workers, it puts American taxpayers, it puts the American economy at risk, and I can’t support someone like that for chairman at the Federal Reserve.”

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