As expected, the Federal Reserve approved a quarter-point interest rate cut today. It won’t satisfy President Trump, who maintained in the run-up to the Federal Open Market Committee meeting this week that “Too Late” — his not-so-affectionate name for Fed Chairman Jerome Powell — “MUST CUT INTEREST RATES, NOW, AND BIGGER THAN HE HAD IN MIND. HOUSING WILL SOAR!!!”

The president claims that interest rates are a full three points too high. The Wall Street Journal’s editors argued this week that such a cut “would guarantee a new burst of inflation.” And our Andrew Stuttaford approvingly notes the analysis of Cato’s Jai Kedia that our current situation probably called for “no change to rates or even a slight increase.” Kedia made that assessment because “last week’s inflation report shows that prices are increasing much faster than the Fed’s 2 percent [inflation] target, indicating real concerns of a supply shock that has caused both inflated prices and unemployment.”

With prices rising, debt mounting, and the Trump tariff tax hikes still in effect, the politician in the White House naturally wants to cut interest rates. But, to quote our Dominic Pino, “central bankers, when they are doing their job well, frequently have to say ‘no’ to politicians who want monetary sugar highs for electoral purposes.”

Dominic wrote that in the context of discussing Stephen Miran, whom the president has placed on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors even though Miran hasn’t really left the Trump administration. On Monday, I wrote about the then-anticipated (and promptly consummated) rubber-stamping by the Republican-controlled Senate of Miran’s unusual arrangement: He has taken a leave of absence from his day job as chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers to complete the unexpired term of a retired governor that ends in February; after that, the plan is for him to return to the White House. Of course, he won’t have a Trump White House job to come back to unless he pushes the president’s agenda at the Fed, in particular at Federal Open Market Committee meetings during which interest rate adjustments are decided — not only this week but in October, December, and January.

At today’s vote, after weeks of badgering by the president, eleven of the twelve FOMC members supported the quarter-point cut. The lone dissenter was Miran; he maintained that the cut should have been double that.