Trump learns the hard way that interest rates control the presidency, not the other way around |
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The one thing absolutely nobody disputes is that Jerome Powell’s life would personally be much, much better if he just let himself retire. At almost 73, Powell has long hinted at his intention to resign entirely from the Federal Reserve after his term as chairman expires in May, even though his term as a board governor doesn’t expire for another two years. After nearly 14 years at the central bank, Powell — who has trudged through the trenches during the failure of the Fed’s decadelong experiment in zero interest rate policy, his failed 2018 attempt to right the ship with quantitative tightening, the central bank’s total surrender to the COVID-19-era ZIRP zeitgeist, culminating in the worst inflationary crisis since the catastrophe of Presidents Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter, and finally, achieving a soft enough landing with historically full employment maintained as inflation stabilizes below 3% — should be ready to retire from the vicissitudes of the most important finance job on the planet.
Powell would undoubtedly be a happier septuagenarian if he traded the grueling, often thankless weight of U.S. monetary policy for some cushy Ivy League professorship, a seven-figure book deal, and summers far, far from Washington.
But because President Donald Trump wants Powell to prematurely quit so badly, to the point of his Justice Department launching an unprecedented criminal inquiry into a congressional testimony about the renovation of the Fed’s D.C. headquarters, the mild-mannered Powell is dug in.
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As he should be, because the second thing almost everybody agrees on is that the criminal investigation into Powell is purely pretextual.
Powell, who issued an unprecedented statement after receiving the DOJ’s unprecedented subpoena, asserted that the threat of criminal charges was “a consequence of the Federal Reserve setting........