The White House has taken yet another shot at the Fed, with Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council, saying that the central bank’s economists should be “disciplined” for publishing a report showing US businesses and consumers are bearing the bulk of the costs from Trump’s tariffs.

The study, released last week, suggested they paid nearly 90 per cent of the cost of Trump’s tariffs in 2025, with the burden decreasing slightly as the year progressed.

Hassett, a close adviser to Trump who had been a frontrunner to be the central bank’s next chair, yesterday described the recent report from the New York Fed as “an embarrassment” and argued that it failed to portray the full breadth of Trump’s levies.

“It’s I think the worst paper I’ve ever seen in the history of the Federal Reserve system,” Hassett told CNBC on Wednesday. “The people associated with this paper should presumably be disciplined.”

He added: “What they’ve done is they’ve put out a conclusion which has created a lot of news that’s highly partisan based on analysis that wouldn’t be accepted in a first semester econ[omics] class.”

This is the latest attack from the White House against the Federal Reserve, an independent federal agency that the Trump administration has been criticizing and targeting for months

I find it ironic that the same people who say that China will pay billions of dollars in tariffs and that tariffs are not simply a sales tax say the Fed analysis wouldn’t be accepted in a first semester econ[omics] class.”

Jeff