As the 2020 presidential election season heats up, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell is being pushed from all sides. President Trump has castigated him for overly tight monetary policy and has implied that Powell is a “bigger enemy” than Xi Jinping. Meanwhile, William Dudley, who recently headed…
A lot of ink was spilled last month over President Trump's criticism of the Fed raising interest rates. Observers worried that those criticisms meant the President was prepared to directly meddle with U.S. monetary policy. But so far, at least, there’s no evidence that any such meddling has…
President Trump’s nomination of Jerome Powell as the next chairman of the Federal Reserve System is a bet that he will continue Janet Yellen’s policies and not rock financial markets. The expectation is that Powell will follow the Fed’s already-announced normalization schedule, which calls for slowly reducing…
The president just announced his pick to chair the Federal Reserve System. Subject to Senate confirmation, current Fed governor Jerome “Jay” Powell will succeed Janet Yellen as Fed chair in February 2018. Market reaction to this announcement has been sanguine, with commentators describing Powell as the "continuity candidate."…
Whenever a government agency gains a new power, there’s a risk that, whatever the power’s original intent, it will end up being put to other uses, perhaps good, but often bad. Such is the case for the Fed’s power to pay banks interest on their Federal Reserve…