Jerome Hayden "Jay" Powell was born on February 4,1953 and is an American attorney and investment banker who has served as the 16th chair of the Federal Reserve since 2018.
44 Facts About Jerome Powell
2.
Jerome Powell was a visiting scholar at the Bipartisan Policy Center from 2010 to 2012, before returning to public service.
3.
Jerome Powell became a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors after being nominated to the post by President Barack Obama in 2012, he was elevated to chairman by President Donald Trump, and renominated to the position by President Joe Biden.
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Jerome Powell built his reputation in Washington during the Obama administration as a consensus-builder and problem-solver.
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Jerome Powell received bipartisan praise for the actions taken by the Federal Reserve in early 2020 to combat the financial effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Jerome Powell has responded by arguing that supporting the Fed's dual mandate of stable prices and full employment outweighed concern over high asset prices.
7.
Time said the scale and manner of Jerome Powell's actions had "changed the Fed forever" and shared concerns that he had conditioned Wall Street to unsustainable levels of monetary stimulus to artificially support high asset prices.
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Jerome Powell has five siblings: Susan, Matthew, Tia, Libby, and Monica.
9.
In 1972, Jerome Powell graduated from Georgetown Preparatory School, a Jesuit university-preparatory school.
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Jerome Powell received a Bachelor of Arts in politics from Princeton University in 1975, where his senior thesis was titled "South Africa: Forces for Change".
11.
Jerome Powell earned a Juris Doctor degree from Georgetown University Law Center in 1979, where he was editor-in-chief of the Georgetown Law Journal.
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In 1979, Jerome Powell moved to New York City and became a clerk to Judge Ellsworth Van Graafeiland of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
13.
Jerome Powell was involved in the negotiations that made Warren Buffett the chairman of Salomon.
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In 1993, Jerome Powell began working as a managing director for Bankers Trust.
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From 1997 to 2005, Jerome Powell was a partner at The Carlyle Group, where he founded and led the Industrial Group within the Carlyle US Buyout Fund.
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In 2008, Jerome Powell became a managing partner of the Global Environment Fund, a private equity and venture capital firm that invests in sustainable energy.
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Between 2010 and 2012, Jerome Powell was a visiting scholar at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a think tank in Washington, DC, where he worked on getting Congress to raise the United States debt ceiling during the United States debt-ceiling crisis of 2011.
18.
Jerome Powell presented the implications to the economy and interest rates of a default or a delay in raising the debt ceiling.
19.
In December 2011, along with Jeremy C Stein, Powell was nominated to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors by President Barack Obama.
20.
Jerome Powell's nomination was the first time that a president nominated a member of the opposition party for such a position since 1988.
21.
Jerome Powell took office on May 25,2012, to fill the unexpired term of Frederic Mishkin, who resigned.
22.
Jerome Powell was a skeptic of round 3 of quantitative easing, initiated in September 2012, although he eventually voted for it.
23.
In 2013 Jerome Powell endorsed financial regulation to end the problem of institutions that are too big to fail, while urging that it should be implemented carefully.
24.
Jerome Powell expressed concerns that, in the current situation, the government is responsible for mortgage defaults and that lending standards were too rigid, noting that these can be solved by encouraging "ample amounts of private capital to support housing finance activities".
25.
On November 2,2017, President Donald Trump nominated Jerome Powell to serve as the chair of the Federal Reserve, replacing Janet Yellen at the helm of the central bank.
26.
Jerome Powell abandoned quantitative tightening in early 2019, leading to a recovery in asset prices.
27.
Trump continued to state, with increasing hostility, that Jerome Powell was not reacting quickly enough.
28.
In October 2019, as asset prices waned, Jerome Powell announced the Fed would return to expanding its balance sheet, which led to a global rally in assets.
29.
Jerome Powell said the Fed's actions were not quantitative easing, but some dubbed them as being QE4.
30.
Where Bernanke-era quantitative was conducted through outright purchases of assets, Jerome Powell's expansion operates through overnight repurchase agreements where the seller has the option to reverse the transaction.
31.
In early 2020, Jerome Powell launched an unprecedented series of actions to counter the financial market impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, which included a dramatic expansion of the Fed's balance sheet and introduction of new tools, including the direct purchase of corporate bonds, and direct lending programs.
32.
Jerome Powell emphasized monetary policy alone without an equivalent fiscal policy response from Congress would widen income inequality.
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Jerome Powell's actions earned him bi-partisan praise, including from Trump, who told Fox News that he was "very happy with his performance" and that "over the last period of six months, he's really stepped up to the plate".
34.
On November 19,2020, after disagreeing with Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, Jerome Powell agreed to return unused crisis funds to the United States Treasury.
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Jerome Powell was criticized for using high levels of direct and indirect quantitative easing as valuations hit levels last seen at the peaks of previous bubbles.
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Jerome Powell defended his actions saying: "I don't know that the connection between asset purchases and financial stability is a particularly tight one", and that he wasn't worried that the Fed's actions were creating asset bubbles.
37.
Steven Pearlstein in The Washington Post said that Jerome Powell had "adopted a strategy that works like a one-way ratchet, providing a floor for stock and bond prices but never a ceiling", and that any attempt by Jerome Powell to abandon this strategy "will trigger a sharp sell-off by investors who have become addicted to monetary stimulus".
38.
The asset price boom during the pandemic attracted a generation of young investors who explicitly credited Jerome Powell for promoting froth in financial markets.
39.
In Jerome Powell's confirmation hearing in 2022 he described inflation as being a "severe threat" to the US economic recovery due to "higher costs of essentials like food, housing and transportation".
40.
Jerome Powell was sworn in for his second term as chair on May 23,2022.
41.
Jerome Powell married Elissa Leonard in 1985 at the Episcopal Washington National Cathedral.
42.
In 2010, Jerome Powell was on the board of governors of Chevy Chase Club, a country club.
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Jerome Powell has served on the boards of charitable and educational institutions including DC Prep, a public charter school, the Bendheim Center for Finance at Princeton University, and The Nature Conservancy.
44.
Jerome Powell was a founder of the Center City Consortium, a group of 16 parochial schools in the poorest areas of Washington, DC.