Press Briefing: Peter Navarro Speaks to Reporters Outside the White House - September 17, 2026

You good? Hey, Peter Navarro here at the White House. I'm the senior counselor, uh, for trade and manufacturing. Um, there's a piece in RealClearMarkets today I'd ask you to read, uh, on why the Federal Reserve decision yesterday to raise rates was a monumental mistake. The rule formulated by Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke, the Greenspan Bernanke rule, is that you never raise interest rates into the teeth of an energy price shock, which is what Warsh and the Fed did yesterday.

And the reason you don't do that is because energy price shocks take money out of your pocket, add expenses to businesses, and they effectively act as a tax. In effect, they do the work of a rate hike to control inflation. And so when the Fed raises rates on top of an energy price shock, it runs the very real risk of an overreaction and driving the economy down into a recession or worse.

Um, what I would challenge the Fed on is this, and, and Chairman Warsh in particular, the history is clear. 1990, we had an energy price shock because of a war in the Middle East. Alan Greenspan did not raise interest rates and eventually lowered them because he understood that the energy price shock depressed purchasing power and was contractionary by its very nature.

And that policy was very successful. 2007, 2008, eerily similar to today, we had Iran threatening to destroy Israel. We had Iran refusing to not develop nuclear weapons. And, uh, we had, um, Iran grabbing ships in the Strait of Hormuz. Back then, that was '06, '07. Uh, uh, energy prices spiked, Bernanke held firm.

He didn't raise rates, and he didn't do it for the same reason Greenspan did. So for, for me, this, it's inexplicable that the Fed and Kevin Warsh does not understand that history. Um, I would urge everybody watching this to go to RealClearMarkets now, see my article on this, and then let's have the, the, the Fed chair and the Fed explain to the American people what it's doing, because what it's doing is a historical and bad economics. Thanks for listening.

Thank you, sir.