US treasury secretary Scott Bessent has said the Federal Reserve is and should be independent but that it had “made a lot of mistakes”, as he defended Donald Trump’s right to fire the central bank governor Lisa Cook.
The president has criticised the Fed and its chair, Jerome Powell, for months for not lowering interest rates. Independent central banks are widely seen as crucial to a stable global financial system. Bessent also rejected the idea that markets were disturbed by the Trump administration’s actions. “S&P’s at a new high and bond yields are fine, so we haven’t seen anything yet,” he said.
Bessent’s comments come as Christine Lagarde, the president of the European Central Bank (ECB), said Trump undermining the independence of the world’s most powerful central bank could pose a “very serious danger” for the world economy.
Trump’s war on Fed is ‘serious danger’ to world economy, says ECB head
Lagarde, who was France’s finance minister until 2011 before leaving to run the International Monetary Fund, said it would be “very difficult” for Trump to take control of Fed decision-making on interest rates, but such a scenario would be highly dangerous.
“If US monetary policy were no longer independent and instead dependent on the dictates of this or that person, then I believe that the effect on the balance of the American economy could – as a result of the effects this would have around the world – be very worrying, because it is the largest economy in the world,” she said, according to remarks reported by Reuters.
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Guatemala says it is willing to receive hundreds of deported children from US
Guatemala is ready and willing to receive about 150 unaccompanied children of all ages each week from the US, the country’s president has said, a day after a US federal judge halted the deportation of 10 Guatemalan children.
Those children had already boarded a plane when a court responded to an emergency appeal on Sunday. They were later returned to the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement.
On Monday, Guatemala’s president, Bernardo Arévalo, told journalists that his government had been coordinating with the US to receive the unaccompanied minors.
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Former CDC leaders slam RFK Jr for endangering Americans’ health
Nine former officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have said that Robert F Kennedy Jr’s leadership of the US health and human services department is “unlike anything our country has ever experienced” and “unacceptable”. They also warned that Kennedy’s leadership “should alarm every American, regardless of political leanings”.
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Trump says he will award Rudy Giuliani the Presidential Medal of Freedom
The president said Monday he would award Rudy Giuliani the nation’s highest civilian honour, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, two days after his longtime political ally was seriously injured in a car crash.
The decision places the award on a man once lauded for leading New York after the 11 September 2001 attacks and later sanctioned by courts and disbarred for amplifying false claims about the 2020 US presidential election. Giuliani, the former New York mayor, was also criminally charged in two states; he has denied wrongdoing.
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Hundreds of ‘workers over billionaires’ Labor Day rallies take place across US
Hundreds of protests organised as part of the national “workers over billionaires” effort – a mass action calling for the protection of social safety – were held in cities large and small across the country, including New York, Houston, Washington DC and Los Angeles.
As the Labor Day rallies took place, Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson sharply denounced the Trump administration’s threat to deploy federal troops to the city as part of an immigration crackdown.
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What else happened today:
For this Labor Day, the Trump administration has draped an enormous banner outside the US labor department with his portrait and the words “American Workers First”. But many labor advocates say Trump has consistently put corporate interests first in his second term as he has taken dozens of actions that hurt workers.
Catching up? Here’s what happened on 31 August 2025.
