Fed chair says bank accounts ‘safe’ despite Trump’s teardown of consumer protection agency

WASHINGTON (AP) — Americans’ bank accounts are safe despite the Trump administration’s shutdown of a consumer financial regulatory agency, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said Tuesday.

Powell, testifying before the Senate Banking Committee, said “bank accounts overall across the economy are safe” and backed by government deposit insurance. Powell’s comments followed partisan comments from Republican and Democratic senators regarding the Trump administration’s order over the weekend for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to end all of its supervisory and rule-making work.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts who pushed for its creation of the CFPB in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and recession, said, “I’d be really worried about doing business with a giant bank when there’s no cop on the beat.”

Powell, meanwhile, received little scrutiny from senators about the Fed’s interest-rate policy, which has contributed to higher borrowing costs but has also been credited for helping bring down inflation.

And while several senators flagged the spike in inflation that followed the pandemic, Powell faced little questioning about when the Fed believes it could return inflation — now at 2.6%, according to the Fed’s preferred measure — to its 2% target.

Sen. John Kennedy, a Republican from Louisiana, praised Powell and the Fed for bringing down inflation from a 7.2% peak in June 2022. Kennedy noted that many economists had forecast that the Fed’s steep rate hikes in 2022 and 2023 would cause a recession. Yet, instead, the economy has continued to expand.

“The fact is, knock on wood, we have experienced a soft landing,” Kennedy said. Fed officials “deserve credit” for that, he added.

Powell largely sought to avoid responding when asked about the potential impact of additional tariffs, which President Donald Trump has proposed, on inflation and the Fed’s key rate, which is currently at about 4.3%, down from a two-decade high of 5.3% last year.

Powell instead underscored his previous comments that with the economy generally healthy the Fed can afford to wait and see how the economy evolves and whether tariffs affect growth and inflation before making any further rate cuts. The Fed cut its key rate three times last year, but last month left it unchanged.

“We do not need to be in a hurry to adjust our policy stance,” Powell said in the first of two days of testimony on Capitol Hill.

Powell was quickly thrust into the partisan turmoil surrounding Trump’s flurry of executive orders and the efforts of billionaire Elon Musk, through the Department of Government Efficiency, to slash government programs.

Warren, who repeatedly referred to “co-president Musk,” also urged Powell to maintain the Fed’s support for the CFPB, which gets its funding from the Fed.

“Do not make the Federal Reserve an accomplice to this illegal act, and forever sully the reputation of the Fed,” Warren said.

Republican senators, however, downplayed the impact of dismantling the CFPB. The bureau has sought to cap overdraft fees, ban junk fees, and says it has returned $20 billion to consumers since its inception.

Sen. Pete Ricketts, a Republican from Nebraska, said that state agencies can still provide consumers with regulatory protections.

“To say that nobody is out there looking after consumers is inaccurate and we ought not to try and scare consumers right now,” Ricketts said.

The Fed Chair also said the central bank has launched a second review of its policy strategies and its communications tools. Powell reiterated that the review would not focus on whether to change its 2% inflation target, which some economists argue is too low. Powell has repeatedly said that the Fed shouldn’t change the target while it is still struggling to get inflation down to 2%.

After the Fed’s last policy review in 2019, it said it would seek inflation that averaged 2% over time. Some economists have argued that the change led the Fed to react too slowly to the inflation spike in 2021 and 2022. The Fed didn’t begin raising its key interest rate until March 2022. Rate hikes are intended to slow borrowing and spending to cool inflation.

Last week, comments by many Fed officials — as well as a decline in the unemployment rate — suggested the odds of a rate cut anytime soon have dwindled.

Fewer cuts could translate into a longer period of elevated mortgage rates and higher costs to borrow money for everything from autos to credit cards. Still, mortgage rates are closely tied to the yield on the 10-year Treasury note, which can move independently of the Fed’s actions.

Last Friday, Fed governor Adriana Kugler said that the labor market was “stable” and that “gives us a little bit of time to make some decisions.”

“The cautious and the prudent step is to hold the (Fed’s key) rate where it is for some time,” Kugler said.

The government said last Friday that employers added a solid number of jobs last month while the unemployment rate ticked down for the second straight month to 4%, historically quite low. Hiring in November and December was revised much higher.

The jobs report “bolsters our confidence that the Fed cutting cycle is over,” economists at Bank of America wrote in a note Friday.

Christopher Rugaber, The Associated Press