Plenty of President Trump’s recent acts as president are making headlines, but there has also been a steady stream of stories about something he hasn’t done: Remove Jerome Powell as chair of the Federal Reserve.

The two previous Fed chairs, Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen, have warned that such a move would upset financial markets and hurt the economy by subverting monetary policy to political whim. Meanwhile, Trump backers are urging him on.

The good news for Americans is that both Trump’s desire to remove Powell and the concerns of those who fear it are misguided: Ending Powell’s chairmanship now, or installing a Trump-aligned chair next May when Powell’s term as chair ends, is unlikely to alter Fed decision making and would have only a short-lived effect on financial markets.

Trump has offered a host of criticisms of Powell, ranging from his oversight of the increasingly costly renovation of the Fed’s Washington buildings (even though the federal government and taxpayers are not paying for the work), to his supposedly insipid personality, to darkly hinting that Powell has engaged in fraud. But Trump’s real complaint is that the Fed isn’t cutting interest rates and so isn’t helping his administration by lowering government borrowing costs and increasing credit-driven consumer spending, thereby boosting the economy.

The Fed began pushing up rates in the

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