Elizabeth Warren

LOADINGERROR LOADING

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) may not approve of President Donald Trump’s handpicked new head of the Federal Reserve, but that doesn’t mean she can’t feel sorry for him.

On Tuesday, the top Democrat told Bloomberg that while she still wasn’t “comfortable” with Kevin Warsh leading the U.S. central bank, she pitied him for having inherited an economic mess of Trump’s making.

Advertisement

“Right now, President Trump has actually put Kevin Warsh in a pretty terrible box,” she said.

Warren predicted the one-time Wall Street banker would be fighting an uphill battle against inflation caused by Trump’s tariff fiasco and energy prices surging under his wars abroad.

“Prices are shooting through the roof for American families and as you know, inflation is at its highest rate in about three-and-a-half years,” she said. “We see that what’s coming down the line looks like prices may be going up even faster.”

Advertisement

During Warsh’s first policy meeting as Fed chair on Wednesday, the board decided not to fiddle with current interest rates.

The decision was a win for Trump, who had hounded Warsh’s predecessor, Jerome Powell, for raising the federal borrowing benchmark in an effort to combat America’s ever-lingering inflation issues.

Advertisement

Elsewhere in the interview, Warren told Bloomberg she still has major concerns about Warsh, whom she warned could end up being Trump’s economic “sock puppet” during his confirmation hearings.

“I am not comfortable with anyone who is not straight-up and honest and transparent with the American people,” she said of the banker, who dodged questions about his ties to the investment world, potential business connections to Trump and other possible conflicts of interest during congressional vetting.

Watch Warren on Bloomberg here: