Fed board member Powell tapped to be its new chair
President Donald Trump t apped Jerome Powell on Thursday to replace Janet Yellen as Fed chair when her term ends in February, choosing a moderate member of the Fed’s board who has backed Yellen’s cautious approach to interest rate hikes.
Powell, 64, is seen as a safe pick whose selection will likely reassure investors hoping for continuity at the central bank. Some analysts see Powell, though, as more inclined than Yellen to ease financial regulations and possibly to favor a faster pace of rate increases.
T r u m p m a d e t h e announcement i n a Rose Garden ceremony with Powell standing beside him. He said Powell had earned the “respect and admiration of his colleagues” in his five years on the Fed’s board.
The president also praised Yellen, the first woman to lead the Fed, whom he decided not to nominate for a second term. He called her a “wonderful woman who has done a terrific job.” In a departure from previous announcements of new Fed chairs, Yellen was not in attendance Thursday.
Powell himself said it had been a privilege to serve under Yellen and her predecessor, Ben Bernanke, and said he’d do all he could to meet the Fed’s dual mandates of stable prices and maximum employment.
Sung Won Sohn, an economics professor at California State University-Channel Islands, suggested that the new chair would likely deviate little from Yellen’s policy leadership if the economy performs as expected.
“Mr. Powell could be considered a clone of Janet Yellen in a positive sense,” Sohn said. “He will continue the same cautious, gradualist policy in setting interest rates that she did.”
If confirmed by the Senate, Powell would become chairman when Yellen’s term ends Feb. 3.
Unlike the past three Fed leaders, Powell lacks a Ph.D. in economics and spent years working at investment firms. In choosing him, Trump decided against offering another term to Yellen despite widespread approval for her performance. The Yellen Fed and its go-slow approach to rate hikes have been credited with helping nurture the continued recovery from the Great Recession. Now, she will become the first Fed leader in decades not to be offered a second term after completing a first.
Conservative Republicans, who have complained that the Fed has grown too independently powerful, praised the selection. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell pledged quick consideration of Powell’s nomination and said the nation needs “a more transparent and accountable Fed.”
Democrats expressed discontent that Yellen hadn’t been given a second term.
“Janet Yellen has been one of the most successful Fed chairs in history, and she deserved to be renominated,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.
Trump acknowledged in a recent TV interview that his decision on a Fed chair might have less to do with Yellen’s performance than with wanting to impose his own stamp on the Fed.
Powell has built a reputation as a collegial centrist on the Fed’s board. Like the current and recent board members, Powell never dissented from the Yellen Fed’s moves to embrace low rates and to adopt other unorthodox policies to help sustain the economy’s recovery from the 2008 financial crisis and the worst downturn since the Great Depression. In a book about his years at the Fed, former Chairman Ben Bernanke praised Powell “as a moderate and a consensus builder.”
While Powell is expected to generally stick with Yellen’s blueprint, no one can be certain that he will. With unemployment at a 16-year low and the economy on firm footing, Powell might want to step up the pace of the Fed’s rate increases, which make loans costlier for companies and individuals over time. The risk in doing so would be in potentially miscalculating the proper pace of rate increases and inadvertently triggering a recession. Corporate profits would suffer, and stock prices would likely tumble.