Change at the Fed

Yahoo has an article by By Rachel Siegel, Hayley Tsukayama and J. Freedom du Lac about a brave, if self-destructive, programmer:

President Donald Trump announced on Thursday he will nominate Jerome Powell to replace Janet Yellen as Chair of the Federal Reserve. Powell, currently a member of the Federal Reserve’s board of governors, had emerged as the odds-on favorite to get the nomination in recent weeks. Pending his confirmation by the Senate, he will take over from Yellen on 4 February 2018. “He’s strong, he’s committed, he’s smart,” Trump said of Powell in an announcement in the Rose Garden on Thursday afternoon. “He has proven to be a consensus-builder for the sound monetary, and financial, policy that he so strongly believes in,” Trump said. “Based on his record, I am confident that Jay has the wisdom and leadership to address the challenges that our economy may face.” “I hope the Senate will swiftly confirm him,” Trump said.

Unlike Yellen, Powell is not a PhD-trained economist, having earned a law degree from Georgetown in 1979 before serving as Undersecretary of the Treasury during the George H.W. Bush administration. Powell was named to the Fed’s board of governors by Barack Obama in 2012 and later re-appointed to a fourteen-year term set to end in January of 2028. “I am both honored and humbled by this opportunity to serve our great country,” Powell said.
“If I am confirmed by the Senate, I will do everything within my power to achieve the goals assigned to the Federal Reserve by the Congress: stable prices and maximum employment.”
“I congratulate my colleague Jay Powell on his nomination to be Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board,” Yellen said in a statement on Thursday. “His long and distinguished career has been marked by dedicated public service and seriousness of purpose. I am confident in his deep commitment to carrying out the vital public mission of the Federal Reserve. I am committed to working with him to ensure a smooth transition.”
Powell is seen by many observers as presenting markets with a seamless transition from the Yellen-led Fed in terms of how he will likely seek to conduct monetary policy.
“Markets should take a Powell announcement largely in stride, keeping financial conditions easy and providing little disruption to an economy that is experiencing solid growth,” said Peter Hooper, an economist at the Deutsche Bank.
“In addition, Powell has now had five years experience working inside the Fed, by all reports very effectively on both macroeconomics/monetary policy and on regulatory policy. He seems well versed in both important spheres of Fed responsibility.”
Tom Porcelli, chief U.S. economist at RBC Capital Markets, said last week that Powell, “would be a natural extension of Yellen at a point where policy is not screaming for a wildly different policy approach.”
Ian Shepherdson, an economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, called Powell the “continuity candidate.”
The most likely area where Powell will differ from Yellen as Fed Chair is on financial regulation.
Powell has been seen my some economists as more sympathetic to the de-regulatory push made by some members of the Trump administration, notably Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. Recall that, back in August, Yellen made a speech at the prestigious Jackson Hole Symposium which effectively argued that the Fed’s post-crisis regulatory approach had been correct.

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