He suggested to The Washington Post that Yellen and her colleagues' policy of maintaining interest rates near zero could inflate a "bubble where you go into a very massive recession".
Eswar Prasad, a professor of global trade at Cornell University, said it was striking that a sitting president would comment so directly on the value of the dollar. On the home front, he threatened to withhold payments to insurers in order to get Democrats to negotiate on health care reform. But that doesn't make for great headlines.
Trump continued to refer to China as a currency manipulator as recently as February 2017, telling Reuters, "I think they're grand champions at manipulation of currency".
That position, sure to antagonize Russian Federation, came as the President adopted the most skeptical view he has yet displayed on the possibility of improving relations with the Kremlin, a position he once advanced as a candidate and that flew in the face of geopolitical realities and universal elite opinion in Washington.
"They're not currency manipulators", Trump said. He actively rejected the need to overthink things; he believed that a reliance on his gut and his highly-attuned sense for what people wanted and when they wanted it was all he needed to be a successful candidate and president.
But Trump told the newspaper Beijing has not been manipulating its currency for months - a point economists have been making for some time.
China's abstention from a United Nations resolution condemning the chemical attack in Syria is the most significant sign yet of warmer ties between Xi Jinping and Donald Trump after they met last week.
On the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly promised to label China a currency manipulator.
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Trump also said he would like to see US interest rates stay low.
Trump Says Health-Care Revamp Still Priority Ahead of Tax Overhaul
Perhaps, when Trump and his White House team said they were "moving on" from health care, they forgot about this nagging detail. Due up as soon as Congress returns from a two-week spring break is a funding bill to keep the government open beyond April 28.
Trump has given heft to the US demand with shows of force.
"Are we insisting on it? No. But I do think it's going to happen at a certain point", Trump said, adding that it's not impossible for peace with Assad still in power. I wouldn't use the word impossible.
The U.S. dollar still rules as the most important currency in the world's markets, which has in recent history created an inverse relationship between gold and the greenback.
Within a few hours of extraordinary political shape-shifting, Trump abandoned stances that were at the bedrock of his establishment-bashing campaign. Trump added that reports of feuds between Bannon and his son-in-law Jared Kushner were "overblown".
"I think he wants to help us with North Korea", Trump said of Xi, crediting China in the news conference with taking a "big step" by turning back boats of coal that North Korea sells to its northern neighbor. Treasury yields fell after Trump said he would like to see interest rates stay low.
And while there are "some very good things about a strong dollar", Trump said, "It's very, very hard to compete when you have a strong dollar and other countries are devaluing their currency".
Besides keeping an eye on the dollar, Wall Street will be paying attention to Thursday's economic calendar in the US, which includes weekly Jobless Claims at 8:30 a.m. EDT, the Producer Price Index for March at 8:30 a.m., Consumer Sentiment for April at 10 a.m., and the weekly Baker Hughes Rig Count at 1 p.m.
Trump called videos of authorities dragging a man off a United Airlines flight in Chicago "horrible" in today's interview.
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