The New Yorker:

The seventy-two-year-old Fed chairman put to shame the heads of law firms, universities, and public companies who have caved to the White House.

By John Cassidy

At first glance, Jerome Powell doesn’t come across as a member of the #Resistance. Lean, angular, and somewhat awkward in public, the chairman of the Federal Reserve looks like a central-casting version of a Wasp banker from the nineteen-fifties. Actually, his paternal lineage is Roman Catholic: his uncle was a priest. Otherwise, though, Powell’s résumé fits to a tee that of an East Coast prepster: Georgetown Prep; Princeton; Georgetown Law; the law firm Davis Polk; the investment bank Dillon Read, where his mentor was Nicholas Brady, who served as Treasury Secretary under Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, and in 1990 gave him his first government job, as an Assistant Secretary for Domestic Finance. (Subsequently, Powell was promoted to Under-Secretary.)

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After leaving the Treasury in 1993, Powell, who is often referred to as Jay, returned to Wall Street. In 1997, he joined the Carlyle Group, a private-equity firm that was known for buying and selling defense businesses and making large profits. In 2005, he left and ran his own firm for a few years. Eventually, he joined the Bipartisan Policy Center, a centrist think tank, where his advocacy for fiscal prudence attracted the notice of Timothy Geithner, the Treasury Secretary in the Obama Administration. Although Powell was a registered Republican, in 2012 Obama appointed him as a governor on the Fed’s board, and in 2018 Donald Trump, much to his eventual regret, elevated him to chair. A little more than a year later, after the central bank had failed to cut interest rates as he demanded, Trump tweeted: “who is our bigger enemy, Jay Powel or Chairman Xi.”

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