WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday launched a broadside against the Federal Reserve and its chairman, Jerome Powell, saying the central bank's policies were hurting U.S. competitiveness.

"The Fed puts us at a competitive disadvantage. China is not our problem, the Federal Reserve is," Trump said on Twitter, adding that interest rates in the United States should be lower than those in Germany, Japan "and all others."

The U.S. central bank on Wednesday cut interest rates for the third time this year to help sustain U.S. growth despite a slowdown in other parts of the world, but signaled there would be no further reductions unless the economy takes a turn for the worse.

Its key overnight lending rate now stands in a target range of between 1.50% and 1.75%.

One of the main reasons for the Fed's decision to cut rates this year has been as insurance against the risks to the economy from the Trump administration's almost 16-month long trade war with China, which has hurt manufacturing and caused a drop in business investment.

In a press conference on Wednesday, Powell expressed hope that the Trump administration may be "a step closer" to resolving the U.S.-China trade war.

U.S. and Chinese negotiators have been racing to finalize a text of the "phase one" agreement for Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping to sign next month, a process clouded by wrangling over U.S. demands for a timetable of Chinese purchases of U.S. farm products.

The United States has higher interest rates than other major economies around the world because of the country's relative health, with the economy still growing moderately on the back of strong consumer spending and unemployment near a 50-year low. By contrast, Japan and Europe's central banks have pushed their own interest rates below zero in a bid to boost their struggling economies.

Trump, in a departure from his White House predecessors who refrained from commenting on Fed policy, has made a habit of criticizing the U.S. central bank amid his demands that the Fed cut rates even deeper to boost economic growth that ebbed to a 1.9% annual rate in the third quarter, well below the 3% level Trump pledged would flow from a round of tax cuts and other actions nearly two years ago.

(Reporting by Tim Ahmann and Lindsay Dunsmuir; Editing by David Clarke and Andrea Ricci)