Trump berates Fed for signaling halt to rate cuts he championed

The odds were never high of President Trump overlooking the Federal Reserve's signal that policymakers won't cut interest rates as much as he wants.

In the end, it took less than 24 hours from the Wednesday announcement for Trump to toss out a Twitter grenade complaining that "people are VERY disappointed" in both the central bank and its chairman, Jerome Powell, the president's hand-picked successor to Janet Yellen.

TRUMP: FEDERAL RESERVE HOLDING US ECONOMY BACK

"The Fed has called it wrong from the beginning," said Trump, who has blamed slides in the stock market this year on the Fed's decision to raise interest rates four times in 2018, to a range of 2.25 percent to 2.5 percent.

FED CUTS INTEREST RATES FOR THIRD TIME

At one point, Trump reportedly asked advisers if he had the authority to fire Powell and was told he didn't. Powell himself has echoed that assessment while declining to comment further about his relationship with Trump, even as the president pushed the Fed to take interest rates to zero, where they were during the financial crisis, or into negative territory, as Japan, Sweden and the European Union have done.

While the U.S. central bank did sign off Wednesday on its third reduction this year in short-term interest rates, Powell said afterward that the new range, 1.5 percent to 1.75 percent, would "likely remain appropriate as long as incoming information about the economy remains broadly consistent" with the monetary policy committee's outlook.

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Trump disagrees vehemently.

"Others are running circles around them and laughing all the way to the bank," the president said on Twitter. "We should have lower interest rates than Germany, Japan and all others. We are now, by far, the biggest and strongest Country, but the Fed puts us at a competitive disadvantage. China is not our problem, the Federal Reserve is! We will win anyway."

Economists and even lawmakers from Trump's own party have warned repeatedly that the trade war with China he initiated would hurt the U.S. economy and undermine the benefit of 2017 tax cuts, a claim that has taken on heightened significance with U.S. growth slowing to 1.9 percent in the third quarter, well short of the expansion of 3 percent or more that the president promised on the campaign trail.

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This is a developing story. Check back for updates.