There is an elephant of sorts in Stephen Miran's corner office on the White House campus. Someone has placed on an easel a blown-up, poster-size printout of President Donald Trump's Aug. 7 Truth Social post announcing that Miran, currently chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, will be the nominee to take a temporary open seat on the Federal Reserve's board of governors.

Miran won't take questions about the Fed, however, given his pending nomination. The administration wants the Senate to vote on his candidacy before the Fed's next policy committee meeting on Sept. 16-17.

Trump is also considering Miran for the longer-term seat held by Governor Lisa Cook, whom Trump said Monday he is firing. She is contesting the decision.

Fortunately, there is still plenty Miran will talk about, including the president's recent decision to convert loans and grants to Intel into a 10% equity stake in the company. Another White House economist described that decision as a "down payment on a sovereign-wealth fund." Debate rages over the effects of Trump's other high-profile interventions in the economy, including tariffs and his Aug. 1 decision to fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics following downward revisions to jobs numbers.

Harvard-trained Miran has been at the center of it all, following Senate confirmation to his current job in March. One point of controversy he is happy to clear up: His surname is pronounced My-run, not Mur-an. "I never really correct people because, like, 100 years ago, there were six more syllables and they got chopped off when my grandparents came to the United States."

But with his profile rising in Trump's orbit, he may have to put his foot down.

Miran spoke with Barron's on Aug. 25. An edited version of the conversation follows.

Barron's: President Trump said this week that the U.S. is interested in taking equity stakes in more companies, as it did with Intel. Are there particular companies in which we should expect the government to invest?

Stephen Miran: We'll see. But there is a pretty profound logic that if the U.S. taxpayer is taking extraordinary steps to support some of these companies, as they did with the Chips Act grants and loans to Intel, the taxpayer needs to be protected. Providing upside exposure in the form of equity is proper stewardship of government resources for the taxpayer.

But does it help the economy? Does it help Intel?

This money was already out the door. The policy question was settled in the previous administration.

What is behind the idea of a sovereign-wealth fund? Is there real thinking going into that?

Not yet in a formal sense, although it is still early in the presidential term. Some of the trade deals that the president negotiated contain material commitments from foreign governments to invest in the United States in cooperation with the U.S. government. The sovereign-wealth fund hasn't been formally birthed yet. However, there are things that resemble it that are starting to materialize.

To many people, this looks like the government picking winners and losers. Do you agree?

These outlays from the [U.S. government] via the Chips Act were made by the previous administration. That attempt to pick winners and losers already happened. Some of those loans turned into not-successful attempts. That's why we're interested in trying to fix those unsuccessful attempts and to provide upside to the taxpayers.

In the scheme of economic policies that have been implemented by President Trump in his first year so far, you're talking about a few billions of dollars with this stuff. What we've done isn't to pick winners and losers; it is to improve the competitiveness of the United States by making it the best place on Earth to invest, to expand, to hire, through generalized economic policies. And what you're talking about there is in the order of magnitude of trillions of dollars.

People often criticize us by saying that we don't have an industrial policy. We do have an industrial policy. It's called tariffs, deregulation, full expensing [of capital investments] and energy abundance.

There is also the criticism that the U.S. shouldn't have an industrial policy at all. That was the traditional Republican position for a long time: Keep government's hands from shaping the economy.

There is an argument for industrial policy as far as national security is concerned. We don't live in the 1990s anymore, when there was no geopolitical adversary. We have a geopolitical adversary, and it is important to make sure that the economy is providing for our national security and that we are self-sufficient in certain key inputs. Having an industrial policy that tends to that is justified.

The question is, are you going to do it by picking winners and losers, or are you going to do it by creating an environment in which there are strong incentives for the private sector to invest?

Think about Operation Warp Speed from [Trump's] first term. That was an extraordinarily successful industrial policy. But it didn't operate by picking winners and losers. It operated by offering a huge reward to whoever provided the innovation that would solve the problem.

There is a debate about whether tariffs will cause a one-time price increase or sustained price increases. You don't expect sustained price increases. How will we know the difference?

I don't think there is any evidence that tariffs have been inflationary thus far. We've looked at the components for every product in the price indices, and at how much of each product is domestically sourced and how much is internationally sourced, and then aggregated up from there. When you do that, you find that imported goods have been getting cheaper relative to domestically produced goods, which is the opposite of what you would expect to see if tariffs were resulting in material inflation pressure.

Internationally, our goods prices have been behaving similarly to our trading partners. You see the same trend in the U.K., Canada, and Mexico. It is difficult to imagine that tariffs are a material driver of inflation right now.

There are strong economic reasons for anticipating there isn't going to be material inflation. First of all, even if prices were passed through to the United States, it is a tax change. We have numerous instances of countries changing value added taxes, which is the closest analog to the experiment. People understand there was a VAT. It changed the price. It was a tax change. And then they move on with their lives, and nothing really changes.

I emphasize, we haven't seen a lot of passthrough. Over time, the evidence will bear out that exporters eat the tariff. But even if American prices did move up because of this, we have plenty of evidence from VATs that it just happens once and then it's done.

Ford said it had $800 million in tariff-related costs in the first half, and expects $2 billion for the year. That seems like passthrough.

People will try and blame things on other people no matter what. Just because they say it, does it mean it's true? No. If I were encountering business problems, I would try to blame tariffs, too.

Of course we want Ford to succeed, and that's why we are engaging in policies like full expensing, deregulation, and energy abundance. It is silly to say that all of the bad things that a company experiences are because of tariffs, but none of the good things are because of the other policy changes. When their profits explode because of the One Big Beautiful Bill, and deregulation, and energy abundance, are they going to say that it's because of those things? No, they won't. They'll say it's because of their brilliant management style.

[Ford declined to comment.]

How would you characterize the labor market right now?

The labor market is in a pretty good place. There is no sign of material layoffs. There are good reasons for thinking that activity is going to pick up in the future based on the policies I described.

In the first half of the year, I saw the hiring rate decline in a way that offered little to like. Fortunately, there was no increase in layoffs and discharges. I expect the labor market to improve markedly from here.

How do you think the economy is coping with a decline in the immigrant population? The Pew Research Center said recently that 1.5 million immigrants have left this country [on net] in the past six months.

It is great for the economy because there is plenty of evidence that imported workers compete with native workers and drive down wages for Americans. We want Americans to be in demand in the labor market.

Who competes with the migrants? It's young folks who aren't terribly skilled, because they're just graduating. It is important that these people will be able to get their foot on the ladder, be able to take the first step to get a first job to get their career in motion.

What you simultaneously do by importing millions and millions of people is drive up prices for Americans while driving their wages down.

I expect our border policy not only to be a game changer in terms of law and order and safety and security, but also in terms of allowing Americans to better get started on their job paths. [Border policy will] be disinflationary, because the supply-demand dynamics in housing will change as a result.

President Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after July's weak payrolls report, accusing her of rigging the numbers. Absent such evidence, will people trust future labor statistics?

There has been a decline in the reliability of the data in the sense that the revisions [to initial monthly estimates] have gotten larger and larger. I am beyond delighted that the administration is deciding to get proactive and do something about it. And I'm really looking forward to the data becoming more reliable. They are of decreasing utility. Part of it is because response rates have come down.

Let me ask you a question. Your brakes start deteriorating and you keep driving, you don't get them fixed. Eventually they stop working altogether, and you get in a car accident. You hit someone, and then you've seriously damaged them. Are you to blame for not having repaired your brakes?

Rigged means that it was the fault of the previous commissioner for not taking the steps to improve the reliability of the data. And to the extent that the data were allowed to continue to decline in quality without taking steps to redress that is indicative of data becoming rigged to be less and less reliable over time.

Returning to our initial subject, are government investments in specific companies weakening the attractiveness of the U.S. as an investment destination?

At the end of the day, capital flows will be determined by investment opportunities. Investment opportunities are determined by economic opportunities. And that is why we are focused on creating the best economy in history. All the other stuff is noise that people talk about because they need something to talk about.

Thank you, Steve.