President Donald Trump recently told The Wall Street Journal he is favoring selecting either National Economic Council head Kevin Hassett or former Federal Reserve Governor Kevin Warsh for the next chair of the Federal Reserve.

Trump has said he expects the next Fed chair to cut interest rates.

How have the candidates under consideration approached interest rate cuts in the past?

Following the 2009 financial crisis, Warsh was skeptical of cutting rates.

At the November 2010 Federal Open Market Committee meeting, Warsh expressed concerns about the Fed’s plan to stimulate the economy by lowering long-term interest rates through additional asset purchases.

“Given what ails us, additional monetary policy measures are, at best, poor substitutes for more powerful pro-growth policies,” he said.

Warsh said the Fed should be “leery of drawing inapt lessons from the crisis to the current policy conjuncture.”

“But when non-traditional tools are needed to loosen policy and markets are functioning more or less normally—even with output and employment below trend—the risk-reward ratio for policy action is decidedly less favorable,” he said. “In my view, these risks increase with the size of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet. As a result, we cannot and should not be as aggressive as conventional policy rules—cultivated in more benign environments—might judge........

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