About Jerome Powell
Jerome Powell, the former chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve, received the 2026 John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award in May 2026 at a ceremony in Boston. In his acceptance speech, Powell said the Federal Reserve had been undergoing a "stress test," and warned against political interference in monetary policy. He stated that the Fed makes its decisions based on economic analysis and does not "take into account the fortunes of any political party or politician in making those decisions." Powell argued that legal protections insulating the Fed from political pressure have served the public well, and said that "if any administration finds a way to remove Fed officials over policy differences, then future administrations will do so as well," adding that the Fed's credibility would be lost.
Powell’s eight-year term as Fed chair ended on May 15, 2026. He announced during an April FOMC press conference that he would remain on the Board of Governors for an unspecified period, saying his decision was driven by concerns over "legal attacks on the Fed" by the administration. He stated he planned to keep "a low profile" and that Kevin Warsh, once confirmed and sworn in, would be the new chair. In his last FOMC press conference, the committee held interest rates steady, noting that inflation was elevated in part due to rising global energy prices and citing a high level of uncertainty in the economic outlook.
Source: AI-verified profile updated from Jerome Powell's recent appearances.
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✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
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Unknown0:00
I wanted to ask more about the repo issues and what you all are doing beyond open market operations. Are you currently, for example, telling examiners not to prefer reserves over Treasuries for supervisory purposes? Are you talking to the Treasury Department about maybe reducing the level of volatility in their account at the Fed? And on the standing repo facility, is it that you would be inclined to do it but you need to figure out the details, or what would kind of drive the decision on whether or not to do that?
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Jerome Powell0:36
So on Treasuries versus reserves, we've done a ton of work on that. We've talked to supervisors, and it's interesting if you look at the banks, they're all over the place on the composition of their buffer. So you have to have a business model, and that business model suggests what your stress outflows will be, and that suggests what your buffer should be. And you see them making quite different choices. Some of them have lots of reserves and fewer Treasuries, and then they change their mind and they switch. So it's not obvious that there's one thing happening there. Notwithstanding that, we've gone out to try to understand that, talking to supervisors. In terms of the TGA, we have not tried to pull the TGA into this yet. We've taken it as exogenous. I don't know that at some point we won't have those discussions, but we want Treasury to be able to have the cash that it needs. And then we said we're essentially taking that as exogenous to our work. There may come a time when we talk about that, but we haven't done much of that. Standing repo facility, so your question on that is what are we thinking about it? I think we are more focused frankly on the bill purchases, the year-end, and also the review of supervisory and regulatory issues that we're digging into. Because we think these are structural things where you could, without sacrificing safety and soundness, just allow the liquidity that is already there to flow more freely, perhaps by making fairly straightforward, non-controversial changes. And we think there is some of that. So we're working hard and fast. But those are things, if they take rule changes, it'll take a notice of public rulemaking, it'll take three months and things like that. Those things take time. These things that we're working on now, though, like going through year-end with the overnight facilities and the bill purchases and the term repo, those are things that we have to do right now and are doing.
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Christopher Rugaber2:51
Hi, Christopher Rugaber at Associated Press. I wanted to ask, the only change in the statement was a drop in the reference to uncertainties around the economy. You seem very confident, or it implies there's a lot of confidence that those uncertainties have gone away. What caused you to make that change for this statement? What were you looking at that?
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Jerome Powell3:13
Well, we did actually, if you look at the statement, you'll notice that we did call out global developments and muted inflation pressures later in the statement. And why do we do that? Those are the things that we've been monitoring all year. We put now in place policies that we think are appropriate to address those things. So we're not revisiting that, but those are just key things and they haven't gone away. So we thought it was appropriate to mention them. They're still subject to the idea that for us to change our stance, we would want to see a material reassessment of the outlook.
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Christopher Rugaber3:50
Well, just to follow real quick on the material reassessment aspect, are you worried that that has set too high a bar for potential cuts next year? We were talking about rate hikes, but no Fed policymaker seems to foresee any cuts next year. Some economists do. Does a material reassessment mean you need to see data actually worsen? Does it reduce your ability to act preemptively the way arguably you did this year?
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Jerome Powell4:18
So I mean, one thing that we're mindful of is that we've cut rates three times since July. That's 75 basis points worth of cuts, and we do believe that monetary policy operates with long and variable lags, and it'll take some time before the full effects of those actions are seen in the economy. So that'll take some time. So that's one reason to hold back and wait. And we think we took strong measures. In fact, if you look more broadly at the Treasury yield curve, it has moved more than 75 basis points. So you've had quite a significant move in the direction of higher accommodation. In terms of what is material, at the end of the day, what I would just say, whether or not a change in the outlook merits a policy response will be a collective judgment of the FOMC. There isn't any single factor that will determine our decisions. We'll look at a full range of data and other information bearing on the economic outlook.
