Trump’s Fed-board firing comes with a rising rate of risk

We’re not seeing much upside in President Donald Trump’s bid to fire Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve Board, just a lot of risk.

For starters, he seems to have chosen needlessly weak grounds: The “cause” he says he’s axing her for consists of allegations from Bill Pulte, the Federal Housing Finance Agency chief, that Cook in 2021 fraudulently claimed two separate properties as her “primary residence” to get better loan terms.

The prez didn’t even wait for Attorney General Pam Bondi to act on Pulte’s criminal referral with an investigation, let alone charges.

Plus, this would be the first-ever removal of a Fed governor since the central bank’s creation in 1913; if it even looks too political, it’ll undermine confidence in the bank’s independence, and therefore in the dollar and the entire US economy.

Indeed, if Trump can even seem to pack the Fed board, some future Democratic prez will do it with a vengeance.

Simply waiting a few months will let the prez legitimately adjust the central bank’s thinking when he replaces Fed chief Jerome Powell.

That may mean interest rates don’t get cut as fast as Trump thinks is best, but it won’t be make or break for the US economy — which is already amping up thanks to the president’s other policies.

And yes, the Fed definitely needs fixing: It’s been digging itself into an ever deeper hole since at least 2008, when it started taking “extraordinary measures” to intervene in the economy — and soon let those measures become routine, even as the Fed board’s become even more of a high priesthood, its critics routinely denounced as ignorant heretics.

But there’s no fast way to fix it, and the president has plenty of more urgent work to do.

It may not win headlines, but sometimes slow and steady is the winning course.