Fed whisperer splits on Powell: A+ as steward, but ‘I don’t think you could give him high marks on the economy’ |
Fed whisperer splits on Powell: A as steward, but ‘I don’t think you could give him high marks on the economy’
After 30 minutes of fielding questions, Jerome Powell put his glasses in his suit pocket, told reporters “I won’t see you next time,” and walked out of his 66th and final press conference as Federal Reserve chair on Wednesday. He didn’t linger for the journalists’ tepid applause.
Many of those journalists in the room will now spend the weekend writing patient eulogies for Powell, the man whose nuanced opinions, measured language and slight facial expressions they’ve learned to read. Jon Hilsenrath used to be the most revered of those Fed watchers. But after nearly two decades covering the Fed for the Wall Street Journal, he left the beat to run his own advisory firm, Serpa Pinto Advisory—which means he can now say what he actually thinks.
“I give him two grades,” Hilsenrath told Fortune after Powell’s conference. On managing the institution and representing it publicly, “I think he gets high marks.” Powell, he said, “managed the place through a deal of turbulence, and the most significant that we’ve seen ever.”
Indeed, he faced a pandemic that shut down the global economy, the fastest tightening cycle in 40 years, a regional banking panic, and a sitting president who called him everything from a “numbskull” to a “loser” while floating his firing on a near-weekly basis.
Throughout it all, Powell steered the Federal Open Market Committee to mostly unanimous decisions, building consensus across 11 other central bankers who........