The Fed chair and the president sat down for a private meeting at the White House on Thursday.

President Donald Trump and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell met privately at the White House on Thursday and there was no meeting of the minds on the path of interest rates.

Instead, according to the accounts from the Fed and the White House, the two leaders seemed to talk past each other.

Trump used the meeting to continue to urge Powell to cut interest rates.

"The president did say that he believes the Fed chair is making a mistake by not lowering interest rates, which is putting us at an economic disadvantage to China and other countries, and the president's been very vocal about that, both publicly and now I can reveal privately as well," said White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.

For his part, Powell said that the Fed's decisions would be based on the data and not on any political factors.

In a statement, the Fed said Powell did not discuss his expectations for interest-rate policy, "except to stress that the path of policy will depend entirely on incoming economic information and what that means for the outlook."

Powell also stressed Fed decisions would be made with "nonpolitical analysis," according to the Fed.

It was the first face-to-face meeting of the two leaders since the start of the new administration.

For most of this year, Trump has been urging Powell, sometimes in caustic tones, to cut interest rates. He has derisively referred to the Fed chair as "Too Late Powell."

Economists say that Trump's public criticism of Powell is counterproductive.

"If your goal is to get mortgage rates down and bond yields down, you don't threaten the central bank," said Ethan Harris, former chief economist at Bank of America Securities.

The market has accepted that the Fed needs to wait to see how Trump's tariffs affect the economy before the central bank acts.

"All the administration is accomplishing by complaining about the Fed is reminding people about the political risks to the central bank," Harris said.

Last month, Trump backed away from threats to fire Powell. And earlier in May, the U.S. Supreme Court indicated that it would allow Powell to remain in office while the Fed chair fought any effort by Trump to remove him.

Vince Reinhart, chief economist at BNY Investments and a former top staffer to Fed Chair Alan Greenspan, said he didn't think either Trump or Powell wanted the meeting.

Reinhart said the meeting was "inevitable" after a question at Powell's press conference in early May.

Powell was asked why he hadn't met with Trump since Inauguration Day. In response, Powell said that he'd never asked for a meeting with any president.

"There's no reason for me to ask for a meeting. It's always been the other way [around]," Powell said.

That led to the questions from reporters at the White House about why Trump had not requested the meeting and led to the invitation, Reinhart said.

"I don't think either party wanted to be there," Reinhart said.

The White House's statement comparing the level of the Fed's benchmark rate with China shows that Trump sees the level of the central bank's interest rate as another tool to use against other countries.

Trump often argued that interest rates were a tool to use against foreign competition like the European Union, said Francesco Bianchi, an economics professor at Johns Hopkins University, who studied Trump's social-media attacks on Powell during his first term.

Trump selected Powell to be Fed chair in 2017, during his first term in the White House. Relations between the two quickly soured when the Fed hiked interest rates steadily after Trump's tax cut was passed.

President Joe Biden then gave Powell a second four-year term that ends next May.

The Fed has kept its benchmark rate in a range of 4.25% to 4.5% since December. Economists have said that the Fed is likely to keep rates steady until uncertainty over the economic impacts of the Trump administration's trade policy eases.

A ruling by a U.S. trade court Wednesday voiding the bulk of the administration's tariffs has only added to that uncertainty in the near term, economists said. An appeals court on Thursday ruled that the tariffs could stay in place for now while the White House appeals the ruling.