Can Trump draw Powell? He says he won’t do it, but his Fed battle may not be over.

During his first mandate, President Trump played with Jerome H. Powell by anger that the president of the Federal Reserve moved too slowly to reduce interest rates. Trump refrained from doing so, but continued to publicly attack Mr. Powell and his colleagues for having maintained too high borrowing costs.

The Fed finally reduced the rates, but not because of Mr. Trump’s jaw. The president’s trade war with China risked rotating the American economy so considerably that the Fed moved preventively in 2019 to avoid a painful slowdown. There were few disadvantages to do so: inflation was not a boring concern at the time, giving managers the flexibility to possibly reduce the rates three times.

Now back, Trump has again started reprimanding Mr. Powell and the Fed, urging them to reduce loan costs. But the economic circumstances today are radically different from those of 2019, opening the way to a more intense confrontation between the Central Bank and Mr. Trump.

Trump said on Tuesday that he had “no intention” to dismiss Mr. Powell despite the castigance for several days, qualifying the chair of the Fed “major loser” and saying that “the dismissal cannot come quickly enough!”

But the confrontation between Mr. Trump and the Fed is likely to linger. On the one hand, a Fed is now much more hesitant to reduce borrowing costs due to the fears that Mr. Trump’s general prices have announced on almost all American trade partners revive slow inflation and economic growth. On the other side is a white house that wants immediate relief and take measures to break the long -standing political independence from the central bank.

“This is an existentially threatening moment for the institution,” said David Wilcox, who is a principal researcher at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, director of American economic research at Bloomberg Economics and former head of the Fed research and statistics division. “We can be about to throw an asset that has taken decades to accumulate.”