下周开始真人秀节目The Apprentice方式选美联储主席，11位候选人已经就位
Trump’s ‘Apprentice’-style competition for Fed chief starts now. Here’s what to know.
Interviews with 11 candidates are expected to start Friday and continue next week
By
Victor Reklaitis
Published: Sept. 4, 2025 at 4:42 p.m. ET
What should investors make of President Trump’s decision to have Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent interview candidates for Fed chair?Photo: MarketWatch photo illustration/Getty Images, iStockphoto
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent looks set to start interviews on Friday with the Trump administration’s 11 candidates for Federal Reserve chair, with the conversations, which are taking place in person or by video call,
reportedly expected to continue next week.
The Treasury chief’s prominent role in the process for selecting the successor to current Fed Chair Jerome Powell isn’t that remarkable, but other aspects of the process that’s now under way are unusual, according to Fed watchers.
“If you were to have asked me to guess months before who would be in the room doing this, I would have said the secretary of the Treasury and the White House chief of staff and maybe some others,” said Princeton economist Alan Blinder, a former Fed vice chair who also served as an economic adviser in the Clinton administration. “It’s not very unusual.”
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At the same time, Blinder said the White House’s decision to announce its 11 candidates is unconventional, and it’s not clear to him why President Donald Trump and his aides made that move. “The White House usually takes some pains — although information gets out — to keep secret, to the best of their ability, the list of people that are being considered for the job,” he told MarketWatch.
It’s possible that the rollout of the list and Bessent’s central role in interviews have to do with pushing back against the view that “Trump is going to pick someone that he has inordinate control over,” said Chris Low, chief economist at FHN Financial. “Bessent is pretty well liked and respected in the markets so far. He’s run the Treasury in a way that has not been disruptive to pricing, and he’s had time on the ground for people to get used to him.”
Other experts
have told MarketWatch that the Trump administration’s approach to settling on a new Fed chair should be viewed as a way to keep pressure on the central bank to lower interest rates. They’ve said that broadening the number of candidates under consideration to include more current Fed policy makers looks like a way to give the administration a chance to tell them privately that it’s time to cut rates much more.
Trump and his allies have repeatedly criticized Powell for not being more aggressive with cuts, with the president at times talking about trying to fire the Fed chief.
The White House’s blitz on the U.S. central bank ramped up further last week as Trump launched an unprecedented effort to oust Fed governor Lisa Cook over an allegation of mortgage fraud.
Who’s on the list
The 11 people on Trump and Bessent’s list for Fed chair include three who have been viewed for months as top or at least strong contenders for the job: former
Fed governor Kevin Warsh, Trump economic adviser Kevin Hassett and current Fed governor Christopher Waller.
The others on the list are
Fed Vice Chair for Supervision Michelle Bowman, Fed Vice Chair Philip Jefferson, Dallas Fed President Lorie Logan and two former Fed officials, Larry Lindsey and James Bullard. There’s also Marc Sumerlin, managing partner and founder of Evenflow Macro; Rick Rieder, BlackRock’s chief investment officer of global fixed income; and David Zervos, chief market strategist for Jefferies.
“The public acknowledgement of who’s in and who’s out is different than how some people have done it in the past, but it’s very consistent with the way the Trump hires people,” said Aaron Klein, a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. He pointed to Trump’s former role as host of “The Apprentice,” the long-running reality-TV show.
“Donald Trump did job interviews in America’s living rooms for years, and he’s conducting the Fed [search] somewhat similarly,” said Klein, who previously worked for the Treasury Department under the Obama administration and for Senate Democrats.
Klein also said that the thing that stands out most to him is that the interview process is taking place against a “backdrop of an existential crisis” over whether the Fed will remain independent. That refers to the view that the central bank has been structured to make decisions that are independent from political pressures.
Related: Top Trump aide chosen for Fed board on track to win approval as questions swirl about the central bank’s independence
Blinder, the former Fed vice chair, expressed similar concerns. “It’s going to be next to impossible for whoever gets the job to convince the market that he or she is not taking orders from the White House,” he said.
In addition, Blinder said that while Bessent’s role in selecting the next Fed chief makes sense, he doesn’t like the proposal made by the Treasury secretary last year to have a “
shadow Fed chair.” The Princeton economist said it looks like that’s what the U.S. could end up getting, as the current situation “has the look to me that they’re planning to announce Powell’s successor well before Powell’s term has ended.”
Bessent eventually walked back his shadow chair plan — which was viewed as a way to sideline Powell, whose term as chair ends in May — but it has remained on the minds of many analysts and investors. “If that person is aggressively opining on monetary policy all the time while not chair of the Fed, but the designee to be chair of the Fed, that could seriously undermine the authority of Chair Powell,” Blinder told MarketWatch.
The Treasury Department didn’t respond immediately to a request for comment.
Why the choice of Fed chair is a crucial one
Selecting a Fed chair is important because the U.S. central bank is “the most important economic policy maker in the United States, if not across the globe,” said Sarah Binder, a professor of political science at George Washington University.
“The decisions it makes affect everybody — people who want to buy a house, people who need a car loan, businesses who are thinking about expanding or not,” she said. Fed officials “are the ones who set the cost of money, and there’s no bigger impact on people’s economic and social well-being than being able to afford a good life, and that gets crystallized into this choice over the Fed chair because it will affect and strongly shape the direction of where the Fed goes on interest rates.”
She also said that while nominees for Fed chair for the past 12 years have needed only 51 votes in the Senate to win confirmation, there haven’t been especially tough and partisan fights so far. “Maybe this is what we’re going to see this time,” said Binder, whose books include “The Myth of Independence: How Congress Governs the Federal Reserve.”
She continued: “It’s possible that all this polarization and partisanship is finally going to really, really catch up to the Fed, which has studiously tried to stay out of that partisan limelight.”
The Treasury chief’s prominent role in the process for selecting the successor to current Fed Chair Jerome Powell isn’t that remarkable, but other aspects of the process now under way are unusual, according to Fed watchers.
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