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If you thought President Donald Trump’s trade war seemed chaotic, buckle up: His latest salvo poses an even greater threat to the economy.

After months of swearing up and down he wouldn’t fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, Trump on Thursday reversed course and said Powell’s “termination” couldn’t come soon enough. Stocks fell sharply.

Then US stock traders had a nice three-day weekend — the first sunny and warm spring weather New York City has seen this year — to ponder whether Trump was serious. Perhaps Thursday’s threat was just a bit of bluster from a president prone to tantrums — a one-off social media post that his more stable advisers will surely try to rein in to avoid an all-out panic.

Or…not.

Shortly after the US stock market opened Monday morning, Trump once again attacked Powell for ostensibly not cutting interest rates fast enough. Stocks immediately tumbled and the US dollar fell to its lowest level in three years.

While Trump’s tariff plan has been disruptive, the uncertainty it created had, to an extent, become priced in. Markets famously hate uncertainty, but the 90-day pause on the administration’s most aggressive tariffs offered a measure of reassurance that Trump may relent if there’s enough of a negative reaction.

Attacking the independence of the Federal Reserve is a new level of recklessness that few thought possible. But now even Kevin Hassett, the White House adviser who literally wrote a book arguing against firing the Fed chair, is saying openly that the administration is discussing whether to do so before Powell’s term ends a year from now.

To be sure, these attacks on Powell could prove empty threats. Trump may be blowing off steam or teeing up Powell as a scapegoat for a future tariff-driven recession, said Krishna Guha, vice chairman of Evercore ISI, in a note.

“But this is self-defeating,” he writes. By publicly undermining Powell, Trump “risks putting upward pressure on inflation expectations, making it harder for the Fed to cut rates.”

Putting aside the very real legal question of whether Trump can actually oust a sitting Fed chair (tl;dr: it’s debatable), here’s why Trump’s renewed fixation on Powell, whom Trump himself appointed in 2017, is so concerning:

The Fed, an independent body that sets US monetary policy, is the ultimate economic safety net. It has the power to absorb big shocks — like a pandemic, say, or a recession triggered by the upending of global trade — through interest rate policy-setting and the use of its virtually unlimited balance sheet.