While Wall Street grapples with the president’s threats to fire the central bank’s boss, the rumor mill surrounding his possible successor has yielded a dizzying surprise of its own, On The Money has learned.

Bill Pulte, the current head of the Federal Housing Finance Authority that runs mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, has lately surfaced as a possible pick alongside the “two Kevins” – Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council; and Kevin Warsh, a Stanford professor and fellow at the right-leaning Hoover Institute.

While Wall Street grapples with the president’s threats to fire the central bank’s boss, the rumor mill surrounding his possible successor has yielded a dizzying surprise of its own. From left Bill Pulte, Kevin Warsh and Kevin Hassett

Let’s be clear – this Pulte rumor is not getting a lot of credence. Pulte is not an economist. He has a degree in broadcast journalism. He is 37 years old. Yet his name oddly began bouncing around the outer edge of the rumor mill after he posted on social media last week that the current Fed chair might step down.

Yes, Pulte runs an agency that oversees some $7 trillion in loans. He’s also the scion of the Pulte family that runs the big residential construction company now known as the Pulte Group. He worked in private equity.

But his social media feed shows he also tapped into the meme stock craze, even if he was careful not to give specific buy recs.

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While I kind of like the idea of a meme-stock guy running the Fed just for comedic value, the markets would probably puke with interest rates on the 10 and 30-year bond exploding.

On the other hand, we all know Trump loves easy money (he hates Powell for not being easier with it) and has made some unconventional choices for his cabinet in the past (cf. Matt Gaetz, Pete Hegseth, RFK Jr., etc., etc.).

It’s probably nothing, of course. Has to be, right? Just one more thing to make the suits on Wall Street sweat a little harder this summer.

Kevin Hassett is a smart economist who’s also good on TV — a plus in Trump’s world. Getty Images

Back to reality (we hope?). Kevin Hassett  is a smart economist. He co-authored the 1999 book “Dow 36,0000” predicting a massive bull market in stocks. The markets subsequently fell with the dot-com bust, but the prediction was highly prescient, with the down closing Wednesday over 44,000.

Hassett is also good on TV — a plus in Trump world, but again, the question becomes whether he will be seen as a rubber-stamp on interest rate policy given his loyalty to the president and whether that will lead to bond market turmoil.

That brings us to the best choice for the job, Kevin Warsh, who  seems to have it all. He’s camera ready, and he has both the professional chops to do the job having been on the Fed’s board of governors during the 2008 financial crisis.

As reported, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is leading the search, and could pick himself. AFP via Getty Images

He’s said to be close with Trump who has leaned on him over the years on monetary policy issues. Another plus: Warsh has been a critic of Jerome Powell’s handling of interest rate policy.

Seems like a shoe-in for Trump right? Well maybe not. Warsh’s Powell critique is mainly over the Fed chair missing the boat on inflation back in 2021 and not raising interest rates fast enough. He would run a less interventionist Fed if he had his druthers, which might not be to The Donald’s liking given the president’s obsession with lower short term rates.

All that said, Warsh would make a really good Fed chair and he and Trump have a bond, I am told. Trump does pick people for top jobs he likes.

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As reported, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is leading the search, and could pick himself, which would be interesting to watch as that controversy unfolds. Bessent is highly qualified, though. He made his mark on Wall Street as a savvy hedge fund trader, worked for George Soros, the 94-year-old left-wing financier, who made his own fortune back in the day for shorting (betting against) the pound sterling and “breaking” the Bank of England during the UK currency crisis.

In other words Bessent understands monetary policy as well as anyone and Trump obviously trusts his economic knowledge since he’s heading his trade negotiations. His baggage will be making money – maybe too much of it as a speculator.

Can’t wait for those confirmation hearings.

The post The race to succeed Jerome Powell at the Fed just got weirder appeared first on Our Story Insight.

Bill Pulte, the chair of US government-backed mortgage lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, posted on X that he heard “reports” of Powell wavering about finishing his term — without providing any evidence.

“I think this will be the right decision for America, and the economy will boom,” the former journalist and private equity titan said.

Powell is facing heat for the expensive renovations of the Federal Reserve. REUTERS

Pulte, who as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency oversees Fannie and Freddie, did not reply to The Post’s request for comment.

A separate senior government official said “high-level, credible sources” inside the administration believe the under-fire Fed chair is weighing whether to walk away from his job.

The insider said Powell “had been feeling the heat” and has grown “fatigued “since The Post broke the story in April about how Fed bureaucrats had blown $2.5 billion on the revamp of its DC offices that Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) said was akin to the “Palace of Versailles.”

“Why would you stay at a party when no one wants you there?” the source added.

President Trump — who has repeatedly labeled Powell as “Too Slow” for failing to cut interest rates — on Thursday appointed three new members to the National Capital Planning Commission, which regulates federal development projects.

The shake up at NCPC, which has five voting members, is being seen as yet another move to pile more pressure on the man he nominated as Fed chair in 2018 to step aside.

A senior administration official told The Post that the string of broadsides launched at the 72-year-old Powell were part of a game of “4D chess” being played by the commander-in-chief and his allies, designed to pressure him into resigning.

A Fed spokesman declined to comment, pointing only to remarks on April 4 where Powell said he “intends” to see out his full term that expires in May 2026.

Bill Pulte, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, has repeatedly called for Powell to quit after what he called his “deceptive” testimony to Congress last month. Bloomberg via Getty Images

Powell has been accused by Pulte and other critics of misleading Congress when he lashed out at this newspaper’s “inflammatory coverage” that he branded “misleading and inaccurate.”

“There’s no VIP dining room. There’s no new marble. There are no special elevators,” Powell insisted during a June 25 hearing to the Senate Banking Committee. “There are no new water features, there’s no beehives, and there’s no roof terrace gardens.”

But his denials directly contradicted the project’s own planning document that had been signed off by NCPC in 2021.

The comments also drew scrutiny from the Office of Management and Budget chief Russ Vought on Thursday.

REUTERS

The White House spending watchdog took Powell to task for the glorified vanity project, which saw its costs balloon by 30% — from the original estimate of $1.9 billion.

“The President is extremely troubled by your management of the Federal Reserve System,” Vought wrote in a letter to Powell first obtained by The Post. 

“Instead of attempting to right the Fed’s fiscal ship, you have plowed ahead with an ostentatious overhaul of your Washington DC headquarters,” he wrote.

On Tuesday, The Post obtained a copy of the Fed’s 2025 budget via the Freedom of Information Act that confirmed the eye-popping cost of the work for the first time.

Powell had claimed to Congress that many of the plans rubber-stamped by the NCPC had since been discarded.

Rendings filed with the NCPC show what the controversial $2.5 billion project will look like once completed. NCPC

Vought said that would be a flagrant breach of the National Capital Planning Act that regulates building work on the National Mall. His letter demanded that Powell provide answers to a list of questions by next week.

The Fed’s next meeting is scheduled for the end of the July. The consensus on Wall Street is that the Fed interest rate, currently between 4.25% and 4.5%, will again remain unchanged.

Should Powell step down, his reported replacements are most likely to be Kevin Hassett, the director of the National Economic Council of the United States, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent or former Fed Governor Kevin Warsh.

But one White House insider insisted that Powell was going nowhere.

“There are no plans to change the Fed chair,” the senior source said.

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Bessent said it was up to the Fed to decide interest rates, although he added that if the central bank did not cut interest rates soon, any potential rate cut in September could be higher.

With the unemployment rate low and inflation above their 2% target, Fed officials have been reluctant to cut interest rates from the current 4.25% to 4.5% range until it is clear that the Trump administration’s tariff plans won’t drive up prices.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said if the central bank did not cut interest rates soon, any potential rate cut in September could be higher. REUTERS

President Trump has railed against Powell, a fellow Republican whom he appointed during his first time in office, and again urged him to resign. The president cannot fire Powell over a policy dispute.

Trump administration officials argue that a tax bill that passed in Congress will boost private sector investment and strengthen the US economy, insisting that while tariff increases could result in a one-time bump in prices, they should not drive up inflation over the longer term.

“If they want to make a mistake here and not cut, that’s fine,” Bessent told CNBC, insisting that tariffs imposed by Trump since taking office in January had not fueled inflation “thus far.”

“What we’ve seen so far is that tariffs haven’t hurt. The dog that didn’t bark was that tariffs are going to hurt the economy, they’re going to hurt markets,” Bessent said, citing a rapid market recovery after a 15% decline in April. The selloff came after Trump announced higher than expected tariffs against most US trading partners on April 2.

Based on previous Fed models, he said, the central bank would have already cut interest rates that are “very high real rates.”

Holding off raised the chance that the Fed would need to cut interest rates by more later, said Bessent, who has been named a contender for the Fed chair role.

President Trump has railed against Powell, a fellow Republican whom he appointed during his first time in office, and again urged him to resign. AP

Two jobs?

Asked if one could head both Treasury and the Fed at the same time, Bessent said that hadn’t been done since the 1930s, but did not explicitly rule out such a solution. Bessent said he was happy in his current job.

The Federal Reserve Act explicitly says “The members of the Board shall devote their entire time to the business of the Board,” which appears to rule out the possibility of Bessent doing two jobs at once.

Trump recently named Secretary of State Marco Rubio to serve as his national security adviser, making him the first person to hold both roles since Henry Kissinger in the 1970s.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on Monday holds a handwritten note by Trump to Powell. JIM LO SCALZO/EPA/Shutterstock

Bessent said the administration will work on nominating a Fed chair to succeed Powell in the fall.

“We’ve been busy. The president’s been doing peace deals, trade deals, tax deals, and we are landing the plane on all of those. So we’re going to have more bandwidth after Labor Day,” he said.

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