Historically, presidents wanted interest rates to go in only one direction: down.

As with so much else, Donald Trump breaks with that tradition. Early in the campaign he called himself a “low-interest rates person,” but by the end he was warning that low rates were fueling a bubble, distorting markets and robbing savers: “Those people have really been discriminated against.”

While Mr. Trump is no economist, he is articulating a view that is getting traction with economists and financiers: that even if superlow interest rates don’t produce inflation, they can do more harm than good by distorting markets, redistributing wealth and fueling bubbles, and the Federal Reserve ought to abandon them.

“We should look at whether Fed intervention in interest rates or credit markets distorts monetary signals, so that you get this false economy,” said Judy Shelton, an author on monetary topics and adviser to Mr. Trump, in an interview.

Mohamed El-Erian, an adviser to the German insurer Allianz , says: “You don’t get growth, but you have the cost of higher wealth inequality, and it’s very visible.”