The Citadel hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin is taking on the president over his attacks on the Federal Reserve as others remain silent
Is a revolt against President Trump brewing on Wall Street? Until this week the response of America’s finance leaders to Trump’s attacks on the Federal Reserve had been muted.
However, the White House is likely to be rattled by an intervention from Ken Griffin, 56, the billionaire founder of the Citadel hedge fund, who is one of the Republican Party’s biggest Wall Street donors.
Griffin delivered one of the most severe critiques of Trump of any US business leader so far this year with an opinion column in the Wall Street Journal on Monday warning that the president’s assault on the Federal Reserve’s independence risks stoking both higher inflation and higher long-term rates.
The “president’s strategy of publicly criticising the Fed, suggesting the dismissal of governors and pressuring the central bank to adopt a more permissive stance toward inflation carries steep costs”, Griffin warned in the column co-authored with Anil Kashyap, a professor at the University of Chicago’s business school.