WASHINGTON, July 5 -- India has received many kinds of attention from the Trump White House - trade ultimatums, tariff threats, and periodic praise that arrives attached to something else. The something else this time was the Federal Reserve.

In an exclusive Oval Office interview with CNBC's Joe Kernen on July 2, President Trump held up India's economic performance as an indictment of American monetary policy. "You have a couple of countries, India is one, doing very well, but it's at 7, 8 per cent," he told Kernen. "There's no reason we should stop at 4 per cent. We should be at 12 and 13 per cent GDP."

What Trump was describing was not a foreign policy position on India. He was arguing that the Federal Reserve's management of inflatio...