Did Trump give us our most progressive Fed chair yet?

Making sense of the Fed's surprising move

Jerome Powell.
(Image credit: Illustrated | BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images, VectaRay/iStock)

It looks like the Federal Reserve is going to do something remarkable this week: It's going to cut interest rates while unemployment is lower than it's been in decades.

Even more remarkably, Fed Chair Jerome Powell has been pretty explicit that they'll do this to help "communities at the edge of the workforce," as Powell put it at a recent congressional hearing. "It's just so important for us to continue that process for a couple of years." It's shocking rationale considering that Powell — along with most voting Fed officials at this point — was put in place by President Trump, a man not exactly known for his concern for the less privileged.

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Jeff Spross

Jeff Spross was the economics and business correspondent at TheWeek.com. He was previously a reporter at ThinkProgress.