Blasting Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell on social media may have become too boring for President Donald Trump.

The president widened his net Tuesday to include Goldman Sachs, its chief economist and its CEO.

“David Solomon and Goldman Sachs refuse to give credit where credit is due,” Trump wrote Tuesday in a Truth Social post. “They made a bad prediction a long time ago on both the Market repercussion and the Tariffs themselves … I think that David should go out and get himself a new Economist or, maybe, he ought to just focus on being a DJ, and not bother running a major Financial Institution.”

Trump did not name the Goldman economist in his post, but Jan Hatzius headlined a research note Sunday indicating the bank’s “estimates imply that US consumers had absorbed 22% of tariff costs through June but that their share will likely rise to 67% by October if the later tariffs have the same impact over time as the earliest tariffs.”

“We stand by the results of the study,” Goldman economist David Mericle told CNBC on Wednesday. “If the most recent tariffs like the April tariff, follow the same pattern that we’ve seen with those earliest February tariffs, we estimate that consumers would bear about two-thirds of the cost.”

A new set of reciprocal tariffs went into effect Aug. 1. Tariff revenue jumped to nearly $28 billion in July alone, according to the Treasury Department. Consumer prices for the same month are up 2.7% year over year – a slighter increase than expected.

“For the most part, Consumers aren’t even paying these Tariffs, it is mostly Companies and Governments, many of them Foreign, picking up the tabs,” Trump wrote in his post Tuesday.

Another figure on Trump’s team was talking Tuesday.

“The only entity which has less respect in terms of their data than the [Bureau of Labor Statistics] these days is Goldman Sachs,” the president’s trade adviser, Peter Navarro, told Bloomberg on Tuesday.

Trump fired BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer this month, accusing her, without evidence, of “rigg[ing]” the monthly jobs reports for “political purposes.” The report indicated the U.S. economy added roughly 73,000 jobs in July – far below expectations. Trump this week nominated Heritage Foundation economist E.J. Antoni to lead the bureau instead – a move that sparked credibility concerns even among other conservatives.

“There are countless competent, respected conservative economists who could do a terrific job running BLS,” Jessica Riedl, a former Heritage fellow who now serves at the Manhattan Institute, wrote, according to the Financial Times. “But no credible economist would take a job in which you’d get fired for publishing accurate data.”

Not above a grudge

Trump, of course, has no direct influence on Hatzius’ (or Mericle’s) continued employment at Goldman.

Hatzius in 2008 predicted that mortgage defaults could lead to a severe recession. But Trump may be referring to a more recent forecast – and in the president’s eyes, a more personal one, when he wrote Tuesday, of Goldman: “They were wrong, just like they are wrong about so much else.”   

Goldman’s economists last September predicted that a Democratic election victory, both in the White House and Congress, would boost economic growth, while a Trump win could lead to a 0.5 percentage-point downturn.

“I don’t know why Goldman hasn’t tried to hire a more balanced economic team,” Kevin Hassett, then Trump’s economic adviser, said at the time, according to The Wall Street Journal. Hassett, now the director of the White House’s National Economic Council, is on Trump’s shortlist of potential nominees for Fed chair.

Trump has shown he’s not above holding a grudge, either. And Solomon, according to Bloomberg, met with Trump last month – as did other big-bank CEOs – to discuss potential plans for an initial public offering of government-held mortgage lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The implication may be that Goldman stands to miss out on a role in the IPO because of Trump’s displeasure with certain figures at the bank – not least of which is Solomon himself. Trump even took the time to reference the CEO’s erstwhile side gig as a turntablist.

Solomon’s occasional DJing drew flak early in the COVID-19 pandemic, when he performed at an event in the Hamptons, in violation of social distancing rules in place at the time. Solomon has not publicly spun records since Lollapalooza in 2022.

“Music was not a distraction from David’s work,” Goldman spokesperson Tony Fratto told the Financial Times in 2023. “The media attention became a distraction.”

Fallout for Moynihan, Dimon

Solomon is far from the only big-bank CEO Trump has singled out; he’s just the most recent. The president called out Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan – and JPMorgan Chase chief Jamie Dimon, by extension – in January, claiming the banks closed conservatives’ accounts – or refused to do business with them. Trump last week issued an executive order demanding that regulators remove guidance that enables “politicized or unlawful” debanking. (Moynihan, too, it should be noted, was among the CEOs who reportedly met with Trump on the presumed Fannie-Freddie IPO.)

"President Trump jawboning about banks, whether it's Goldman Sachs or Bank of America, should not hold any merit when thinking about an overall investment," David Wagner, head of equities at Aptus Capital Advisors, told Reuters. "Investors are bound to have differing opinions regarding the health of the consumer.”

Some bank analysts have admitted purposefully holding back lest their reports run afoul of the audience of one.

Michael Cembalest, chair of market and investment strategy at JPMorgan Asset & Wealth Management, said in April: "This is the first time I've ever had to do a call where I had to think about the things that I was saying, not just in terms of how they reflect our views on markets and economics ... But I had to think about how they might reflect on the firm and some of its colleagues at a time when people are being held accountable for their views and the things that they say in ways that they probably shouldn't be.”

“I've said most of what I wanted to say on this call but not all of it,” Cembalest said, according to Reuters.

Dimon, around the same time, said JPMorgan "expect[s] our analysts to speak their mind freely, give their opinion freely, and we support that.”

The familiar punching bag

But Solomon wasn’t the only financial figure Trump targeted Tuesday. The president went back to the well on Powell, too – and even slammed his former Treasury secretary, for good measure.

“Jerome ‘Too Late’ Powell must NOW lower the rate,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “Steve ‘Manouychin’ really gave me a ‘beauty’ when he pushed this loser.”

Mnuchin reportedly recommended Powell for Fed chair in 2017.

Curiously, Trump also wrote he is “considering allowing a major lawsuit against Powell to proceed because of the horrible, and grossly incompetent, job he has done in managing the construction of the Fed Buildings.”

The over-budget renovations of two Fed buildings have become, by some accounts, a thinly veiled attempt to force Powell out amid Trump’s mounting frustration that the Fed chair has consistently refused to lower the interest rate.

The Federal Open Market Committee’s last meeting to set interest rates drew two dissents – and was followed closely by the resignation of then-Fed Gov. Adriana Kugler.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who is not on the FOMC but had been considered among potential Fed chair nominees, told Bloomberg on Wednesday: “I think we could go into a series of rate cuts here, starting with a 50 basis-point rate cut in September.”

“If you look at any model … we should probably be 150, 175 basis points lower,” he told the wire service.

More alarming, perhaps, may be the inference of legal action. (Isn’t it a judge, not the president, who decides whether a lawsuit moves forward?)

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt declined to give more details on the potential lawsuit when asked for a clarification Tuesday, according to CNBC.

“He’s considering a lawsuit, and I won’t speak on it any further,” Leavitt said. “I will allow the president to do that.”

Trump did not indicate when the suit would be filed or by whom.

“The damage he has done by always being Too Late is incalculable,” he wrote in the post. “Fortunately, the economy is sooo good that we’ve blown through Powell and the complacent Board.”

The Fed declined to comment on Trump’s post.