Fed chair: ‘Men and women should make the same for the same work’

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said Wednesday that “men and women should make the same for the same work, by and large.”

But Powell declined to comment directly on remarks made this week by conservative economic commentator and potential Fed nominee Stephen Moore suggesting that the decline in men’s earnings is the “biggest problem” facing the economy.

“The biggest problem I see in the economy over the last 25 years is what has happened to male earnings — for black males and white males as well. They’ve been declining and that is, I think, a big problem,” Moore said during an interview with CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”

Moore was announced by President Donald Trump in March as a pick for one of two vacant seats on the Fed’s Board of Governors, which is responsible for setting US interest rate policy and is one of the most powerful economic jobs in the world.

His nomination is, however, on the rocks after multiple Republican senators expressed concern about Moore. CNN’s KFile revealed last month that, in interviews as well as in columns written over the past quarter-century, Moore has repeatedly called women’s advancement into question.

He’s also drawn questions about his closeness to Trump, who has broken with longstanding presidential precedent by repeatedly criticizing Fed decisionmaking. On Tuesday, Trump tweeted that the Fed should cut rates by a full point to set the US economy off “like a rocket.”

Moore who was formerly a Wall Street Journal editorial board member and CNN contributor, has not yet been formally nominated. He told CNN on Tuesday that he had no plans to withdraw and expects his vetting to be complete as soon as this week.

“I do need to sit down with every one of them and tell them here’s the truth: I’m not anti-woman,” said Moore. “When they hear that I think they’ll — hopefully they’ll be supportive.”