President Joe Biden will use his meeting with Federal Reserve Chairman Jay Powell to stress that he’s giving the central bank “space to operate” independently to address the inflation crisis, White House economic adviser Brian Deese said.
“The president is underscoring something important,” Deese said in an interview with Bloomberg Television Tuesday. “The respect for the independence of the Fed as an institution is not something that we can take for granted. It’s not something that prior presidents have done.”
The White House has increasingly sought to shift responsibility for inflation to the Federal Reserve in public comments, as polls show rising prices are the top concern among voters ahead of November’s midterm elections. In an op-ed published Monday in the Wall Street Journal, Biden said the Fed has “a primary responsibility to control inflation.”
