Governor, Federal Reserve Board of Governors
Miran Says 'No Doubt' Trump Can Successfully Negotiate Trade Deals
Stephen Miran, White House Council of Economic Advisers Chairman, said there's no doubt that President Trump can negotiate ...
About Stephen Miran
Stephen Miran, a former Federal Reserve governor who served an eight-month tenure and dissented in favor of a rate cut at all six meetings he attended, has commented on the central bank's policy approach. In a June 2026 interview, Miran argued that the Fed has an "excess focus on some backward looking data" and suggested that policymakers should instead base decisions on where inflation is expected to be 12 to 18 months out, citing the lag in monetary policy's effect on the economy. He stated that as long as inflation expectations beyond one year remain stable, Fed credibility is not an issue, but said credibility becomes a concern if those expectations begin to move. In a May 2026 interview, Miran discussed his experience at the Fed, saying he was received internally "very politely" and "very cordially." He advocated for a smaller Fed balance sheet, arguing that a large one "implicates independence to an extent" and creates "murky" questions about the delineation between monetary and fiscal authority. Miran also noted that immigration has both hawkish and dovish implications for policy, lowering the breakeven payroll growth rate while also reducing the neutral rate of interest and being disinflationary through long-lived capital and consumer goods. He acknowledged disagreements with others on policy and said there had been signals from the White House regarding desired policy rates.
Transcript (16 segments)
✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
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Interviewer0:00
I want to now bring in our Bloomberg TV and radio audiences worldwide. We're going to simulcast this. Joining us now is White House Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Stephen Meyer. And, Stephen, thanks very much for joining us. We were just listening to David Kostin of Goldman Sachs giving an optimistic view of the stock market and the way companies are dealing with tariffs. And I wonder how you think about the uncertainty that this creates. You definitely must have calculated that in coming up with this strategy. And if we're going to see an end to that uncertainty come August 1st.
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Stephen Miran0:38
Good morning. Thanks for having me. Look, I do see the uncertainty starting to reduce in the near term. Part of the benefit of uncertainty is it gives us leverage in negotiations. The president knows how to extract concessions from our trading partners, and he has been very successfully doing so. Now, as you've seen with a number of these letters, there are some countries that haven't made the concessions that the United States requires. As a result of decades of accumulated trade deficits, the president has decided that tariff rates should ratchet back up for those countries effective August 1st, and I expect that to happen.
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Interviewer1:10
I want to talk more about the sectoral tariffs, the Section 232. You look at copper just over the last 24 hours and the price increase you've seen in copper alone. This is a critical input for data centers, for power grids, for industrial machinery. And as the administration looks to bring more manufacturing onshore, how isn't it the case that a 50% tariff would impact some of those other efforts to otherwise power the economy?
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Stephen Miran1:35
So you have to differentiate between changes in relative prices and changes in the general price level. When you target a specific good with a tariff like copper or some other specific good, you're going to get relative price changes, and that's totally expected. But that doesn't mean that there's an increase in the general price level, by which we mean inflation, because there are thousands of products and services that go into the general price level, and it's a weighted average across all of those. We just published research yesterday showing that there has been no tariff-induced inflation in a general price level sense since the tariffs began being implemented in January, quite to the contrary of all the Cassandras that were shouting that it was going to be extremely inflationary. There's just no evidence of that thus far, just like in 2018 and 2019.
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Interviewer2:19
Listen, I read the research and we'll get back to it. But on copper, I want to read this note from Jefferies. They say that the US does not have nearly enough mines, smelter, or refinery capacity to be self-sufficient in copper. So why target it?
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Stephen Miran2:36
Well, we need more of it produced domestically. There are certain critical minerals, of which copper is one, that you absolutely need if you're going to have a manufacturing sector. Having a manufacturing sector is important not just economically, because it tends to be a high-capital, high-productivity field with good-paying jobs, but also for national security. You cannot defend yourself if you do not have a robust manufacturing sector, and critical minerals like copper are essential to that. So it will be a little corner in copper? Absolutely not. But can we make more than we currently do? Yes.
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Interviewer3:06
So how long will that take? I mean, for example, when will these copper tariffs go into effect, or is this just a stick rather than a carrot that you use to try and motivate the industry?
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Stephen Miran3:22
No. Well, the president said we're going to do copper tariffs, and I think the president follows through on his promises, so I would expect them to happen. I don't have a date for that happening yet. That process is underway.
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Interviewer3:39
All right. I want to ask also about the first point that you made, using tariffs not necessarily as a revenue raiser but as leverage in discussions. I've watched Japan tariff U.S. automakers for decades now, and they refused to back down. Are you going to be able to extract that kind of concession from such a stubborn economy?
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Stephen Miran4:02
Look, I think the president is one of the best negotiators in history. He's been negotiating deals across every field, from commercial real estate to international trade, for decades. I have no doubt that he can negotiate successfully now, too. But in order to negotiate successfully, other countries have to know that you're serious and that you're willing to do what it takes to get there. That's what these letters show, that we are absolutely serious. So I hope that a country like Japan comes to its senses and makes the concessions they need, because it will be a problem for them if they don't.
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Interviewer4:33
Stephen, I do want to go back to your report, and I do appreciate the reports that have been coming out of the Council of Economic Advisers. I have been reading all of it. On the most recent report on imported goods inflation, what do you say to the people who are looking at the impact of energy prices? Because if you subtract petroleum, you're not getting the same impact. In fact, you're seeing the price of goods rising in many categories that matter to American households, like electrical equipment and appliances.
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Stephen Miran5:00
Yeah. So you're right to flag that energy prices have come down, and we got to the lowest price at the pump since 2021, I think. That's been a huge advantage to American consumers and the American economy. It does drive some of the overall indices in the inflation data. But even if you take energy out and look at core goods, as we do in our paper on durables, you still see the same wedge. No matter how you slice the goods data in the inflation data, there's a consistent roughly 50 to 60 basis point wedge between the price increases in domestically produced goods overall versus the price increases in imported goods alone. When you analyze that 50 basis point wedge, it comes to a bit more than a percentage point at an annualized rate. So when you slice things like taking out energy and just looking at durables, you end up with different levels, but the wedge between overall goods and imported goods remains. So the conclusion continues to hold.
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Interviewer5:59
So I also want to ask about the central bank here. The president himself has been very, very vocal about his desire for lower rates. He said just recently on Truth Social that three points is too high, and he's talking about the interest costs embedded with higher interest rates, which is a good point. When you do have interest costs about to reach $1 trillion or more pretty soon. But at the same time, he has been very critical of the Fed. I want to read you this note from Neel Dutta over at Renaissance Macro. He's basically saying that the pressure the president is putting on the Fed is making it so that any future nominee has to be beholden to what the president is saying. What Neel Dutta said is Trump has created a litmus test for his Fed nominee: they have to agree to cut rates. If Trump picks someone close to his orbit, that person will look like a complete toady, and I'm quoting the research, and have a limited ability to persuade colleagues to a dovish position at some point. Here is the president weighing in on central bank policy. Counterproductive for what should otherwise have been an independent central bank? I think so.
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Stephen Miran7:13
You know, look, I'm a huge fan of Neil, and I get along great, but I don't agree on this point. I don't think that at the end of the day, anything matters but what the policy rate is. I think sitting around talking about optics and internal committee discussions doesn't really matter. What matters is what the policy rate is and what markets expect the policy rate to be. If they expect the policy rate to be better for the economy, then we'll have better economic outcomes and markets will welcome that. If the policy rate is set in a way that's not better for the economy, then we'll have worse economic outcomes and markets will reflect that. The rest of it is just chatter. What matters is whether policy is being set well or poorly.
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Interviewer7:49
Stephen, can I ask about just the basics of raising revenue? What do you expect from tariff revenue, say over the next three or four years, since that's what's left in this term? And what about golden visa revenue? I heard Howard Lutnick saying that you've got 75,000 applicants or queries, and at $5 million a piece, that would be $375 billion, massive amounts of revenue. If you could repeat that every year and bring in at least a quarter trillion dollars in revenue every year from selling visas?
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Stephen Miran8:27
Thanks. So I expect the tariff revenue to be substantial. In the research we put out about the deficit implications of the one big beautiful bill and the rest of the administration's policies, tariff revenue played a substantial role in thinking about where the deficit would go in future years. We had about $3 trillion over a decade from it, which works out to about $400 billion a year. That's pretty close to where CBO ended up when they got around to scoring it, so that's a number I think is a reasonable baseline expectation given tariff rates are going a little bit higher. Now that number might actually be a bit higher than that. So I think it's a fantastic thing to raise money from tariffs, the incidence of which is ultimately borne by the tariff country, and use that money to finance lower marginal rates for American families and firms to encourage more investment and work here and encourage reshoring. That's just a fantastic, commonsense policy combination. With respect to the golden visas, I think Howard has created an amazing product that has attracted enormous interest from foreigners abroad, and I think we're going to see that huge demand materialize. However, I don't expect that demand to reproduce every single year. You'll see a big demand up front.