Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Monday he has “great confidence” in Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh after the central bank raised interest rates by a quarter point against the wishes of President Trump. “I have great confidence in Chair Warsh,”
Page F2From§Eachthe supper edition — 21 September 2026
Fed chair defies Trump on rates, drawing 'bad decision' from one Trump adviser and 'great confidence' from another
As it ran on the front
The math is not complicated, hon, but let's run it anyway.
On September 16, the Federal Reserve — under its new chairman, the one President Trump nominated — voted, unanimously, to raise the benchmark interest rate by a quarter point. First hike under this chair. First hike in three years. The wire notes it plainly: a move that risked drawing the president's ire, because the president has spent months demanding lower rates, not higher ones.…
…(cont) By September 17, the reconciliation gets interesting. Compare the ledger to the last chair's. Jerome Powell got the full Trump treatment for months — public attacks, for holding rates steady, for not cutting fast enough. Warsh raised them outright, the opposite instruction entirely, and the filing shows something else: Trump sparing him criticism. No public rebuke. The column that used to run red for Powell runs blank for Warsh.
Someone in the building noticed the gap anyway. That same day, Peter Navarro — the president's own trade adviser, not an outside critic, not an opposition economist, a member of this White House — went on record calling the rate hike "a bad decision." That should have been the entry that closed the books: the boss's own man, naming the boss's own problem, plainly.
Instead, on September 21, the account gets a third signature. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, asked directly about the man who had just raised rates against the president's stated wishes, didn't reconcile the gap Navarro flagged. He widened it. "I have great confidence in Chair Warsh," he told CNBC's Joe Kernen. Then, for the file: "more importantly, the president has great" confidence too.
So here is the ledger as it stands. One column: a president who spent months demanding lower rates and punished the last chair who wouldn't deliver them. Second column: the new chair he picked, raising rates anyway, unanimously, no punishment recorded. Third column: the president's own trade adviser calling that decision bad. Fourth column: the president's own Treasury secretary calling that same decision, and the man who made it, great.
Four entries, four different verdicts, one Federal Reserve chairman, one week, one administration. In whose ledger does a rate hike get filed as both "a bad decision" and "great confidence" — and whose credit card, whose mortgage, whose small-business loan actually carries the number that came out of that room? That gap isn't a bookkeeping error. That's just where the books landed.
“They didn't pick this guy because they thought he'd defy them — they picked him thinking he'd fold, same as they wanted Powell to fold. He raised the rate on your car loan anyway, and inside one week the trade adviser calls it bad and the Treasury Secretary calls it great, same White House, same man, same decision. That's not confusion, hon, that's the discipline cracking in real time, and you're the one who pays the interest either way it lands.”
“Look, an independent Federal Reserve answering to no one is exactly what you want — nonpartisan, above politics, above any one man's — did I say that? We spent months saying Powell needed to fall in line with the president. Bessent's just expressing confidence in an institution, that's leadership, that's not a contradiction, it's a — okay, it's a little bit a contradiction, but it's a respectful one.”
The receipts
· Trump spares Kevin Warsh from criticism despite Fed rate hike from the morgue, 17 Sep 2026
· Fed raises interest rates in defiance of Trump from the morgue, 16 Sep 2026
· Peter Navarro says Fed's rate raise is 'a bad decision' from the morgue, 17 Sep 2026
· WATCH LIVE: Warsh speaks after Fed raises interest rates from the morgue, 16 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.