The Years of Work Behind Washington’s Best-Liked Man

In Economy On
- Updated

In 2015, I was working as an economist at the Federal Reserve. If someone told you then that in 2020 a deadly pandemic would shut down life as we knew it and that in the midst of a stop-and-go response from Congress, a Federal Reserve chair — who was a lifelong Republican and a Wall Street executive appointed by President Donald Trump — would emerge as a champion of Main Street, you may have thought she was from another planet.

But that’s the world we live in with Jerome Powell as the leader of our nation’s central bank. The swift and steady action from the Fed, a commitment to getting people safely back to work and Mr. Powell’s calm-inducing pronouncements have earned him plenty of bipartisan credit. (There’s now even a wide cross-section of progressives who have become fans of his.) That said, Mr. Powell is not the only hero. The long, hard path to get a more worker-friendly Fed was generations in the making.

Despite its globe-shaping role, the Fed remains something of a mystery. Alan Blinder, a former vice chair at the Fed, likes to joke that when people hear “Federal Reserve” they think it’s a national forest out West.

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