On September 16, 2026, the day this article is published, Jerome Powell still sits on the Board of Governors of the US Federal Reserve — under the chairmanship of his own successor. No recent Fed chair had made that choice in nearly eighty years.
Between his nomination in 2018 and this unprecedented exit, two historically rare shocks had to be weathered: a global pandemic that paralyzed the US economy within weeks, then the most violent inflation surge since the early 1980s. Powell, the Federal Reserve’s 16th chair and the only recent leader to come from private finance rather than academia, handled both crises with the same method: pragmatism, decisions made meeting by meeting, and — a rare move for a sitting central banker — a public acknowledgment of his own timing mistakes.
Key takeaways
- Born February 4, 1953 in Washington, D.C., trained as a lawyer (Princeton, then Georgetown Law) rather than an economist — a singularity among recent Fed chairs.
- Career built on Wall Street and at the US Treasury, then fifteen years in private finance — Carlyle, Severn Capital Partners, Global Environment Fund — before joining the Fed’s Board of Governors in 2012.
- Appointed governor by Barack Obama in 2012, then chair by Donald Trump in 2017, and reappointed by Joe Biden in 2021: two nominations by presidents from opposing parties.
- Handled the Covid-19 emergency starting in March 2020: rates cut to 0%-0.25% and a $700 billion asset purchase program.
- Acknowledged in late November 2021 that inflation was no longer “transitory,” triggering the toughest monetary tightening since Paul Volcker: eleven hikes to 5.25%-5.50% by July 2023.
- Steered three rate cuts in 2024, then three more in 2025, bringing the policy rate to 3.50%-3.75% by December 2025.
- His second term as chair ends on May 15, 2026; he himself serves as interim “chair pro tempore” until Kevin Warsh arrives.
- Something unheard of since Marriner Eccles in the 1940s: he chooses to remain governor after leaving the chairmanship, a term that runs until January 31, 2028.
Early life and education: from Washington to Princeton
Jerome Hayden Powell was born on February 4, 1953 in Washington, D.C. He attended Georgetown Preparatory School for his secondary education, graduating in 1971. At this stage, nothing hinted at a career leading the world’s most powerful central bank: Powell chose political science and earned a B.A. from Princeton University in 1975, before turning to law. He earned his J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center in 1979, where he became editor-in-chief of the Georgetown Law Journal — a position that, at American law schools, already singles out students bound for the highest trajectories.
This background is worth highlighting: unlike most of the recent predecessors and successors at the head of the FOMC — Ben Bernanke, an academic economist, or Janet Yellen, also a career economist — Powell never published a macroeconomic thesis or taught in an economics department. He came to the Fed through market practice, not theory.
Wall Street, the Treasury, then Carlyle: the private financier anomaly
After his studies, Powell first worked as a lawyer, then moved into investment banking in New York. He rose through the ranks at Dillon, Read & Co., becoming vice president between 1984 and 1990. His path then took an institutional turn: under the George H. W. Bush administration, he successively held the posts of Assistant Secretary and then Under Secretary at the US Treasury, in charge of financial institutions policy and the sovereign debt market — direct exposure to the mechanics that, decades later, would shape his decisions as Fed chair.
It was his time at The Carlyle Group, the private equity giant, however, that shaped his profile most lastingly. A partner from 1997 to 2005, he steered investments in the financial sector there. He then co-founded Severn Capital Partners in 2005, and became managing partner of the Global Environment Fund in 2008. The result: when he joined the Board of Governors in 2012, Powell was one of the rare modern-era Fed chairs never to have held an academic post — an investment banker and a private equity financier, not an economics professor. This private-finance background, often reduced to a biographical detail, partly explains his decision-making style: market-data-driven, wary of doctrinal certainties, attentive to how every FOMC announcement ripples through the real financing conditions facing businesses and households.
From governor to Fed chair: two nominations, two opposing presidents
Powell joined the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors on May 25, 2012, appointed by Barack Obama. He spent five years there in relative obscurity, voting on monetary policy decisions without stepping into the spotlight — the chairmanship then belonging to Janet Yellen, who succeeded Ben Bernanke in 2014.
The turning point came on November 2, 2017: in the White House Rose Garden, Donald Trump announced he was nominating Powell as Fed chair rather than reappointing Janet Yellen — a break from the tradition of renewing a sitting Fed chair. The Senate confirmed him overwhelmingly, 84 votes to 13, on January 23, 2018. His first term as chair began on February 5, 2018.
Four years later, as post-Covid inflation was already starting to worry markets, Joe Biden in turn chose to reappoint Powell rather than name a chair from his own party — a decision announced in November 2021 and confirmed by the Senate on May 12, 2022. Powell was sworn in for a second term on May 23, 2022. In total, his career at the Fed was marked by two bipartisan reappointments: appointed governor by a Democratic president, promoted to chair by a Republican president, then kept on by a Democratic president — a rare continuity for such a politically exposed position. To place his trajectory among that of his predecessors, the complete history of Fed chairs traces a century of nominations, from William McChesney Martin to Powell.
March 2020: the Covid-19 shock and the return to zero rates
It was in his third year in office that Powell faced the most brutal test of his chairmanship. As the Covid-19 pandemic paralyzed the global economy, the Fed rolled out one emergency decision after another. On March 15, 2020, a Sunday, the committee announced an emergency cut to the policy rate to 0%-0.25% — the second emergency cut within a few weeks — accompanied by a $700 billion asset purchase program (quantitative easing), meant to keep liquidity flowing in bond markets and prevent a credit freeze.
This response, unanimously praised at the time for its speed, would later come under close scrutiny: together with the massive fiscal stimulus plans passed in Washington, it contributed to fueling the inflationary wave that hit the US economy starting in 2021. But in March 2020, the urgency lay elsewhere: preventing the health crisis from turning into a systemic financial crisis.
