Jerome Powell never expected to become the world’s most powerful economic policymaker. A lawyer by training, not an economist, he was named to the U.S. Federal Reserve Board of Governors in 2012 because he had impressed Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner in helping to cajole congressional Republicans to raise the debt ceiling, and the Obama administration decided to pair a Republican (Powell) with a Democrat (Jeremy Stein) to get two board nominees through the Senate. Powell would likely have been content to cap his career as vice chair of the Fed board in Washington or as president of the New York Fed, the most prominent of the Fed’s 12 regional banks. But in 2017, then-U.S. President Donald Trump had other ideas. Reluctant to reappoint Janet Yellen, a Democrat, to a second four-year term as Fed chair, he took the recommendation of his Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, and chose Powell for the job.
When Powell was sworn in as chair in February 2018, the U.S. unemployment rate was around 4 percent, the Fed’s preferred inflation measure was hovering around its 2 percent target, and GDP was growing at a healthy annual rate of around 2.8 percent. From a macroeconomic perspective, that was central banker nirvana. It didn’t last. If it had, two recent books by Fed reporters would not have been written: Jeanna Smialek’s Limitless and Nick Timiraos’s Trillion Dollar Triage.
In times of economic calm, there’s not much grist for book-length behind-the-scenes accounts from Fed beat reporters. But Powell’s tenure has been consequential, weathering the COVID-19 pandemic, tumult in
