Read the complete write-up of Jerome Powell net worth, age, wife, children, salary, height, family, parents, federal reverse as well as other information you need to know.
Introduction
Jerome Powell is an American economic advisor, lawyer, and former investment banker serving as the 16th chair of the Federal Reserve. He was nominated to the Board of Governors in 2012 by President Barack Obama and subsequently nominated as chair by President Donald Trump, confirmed in each case by the United States Senate.
Powell received bipartisan praise for the actions taken by the Federal Reserve in early-2020 to combat the financial effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. As the Federal Reserve continued to apply high levels of monetary stimulus to further raise asset prices and support growth, some observers perceived a disconnect between asset prices and the economy. Powell has responded by arguing that supporting the Fed’s dual mandate of stable prices and full employment outweighed concern over high asset prices and inequality.
Powell’s definition of “full employment” may mean a tighter labour market than his predecessors. Time said the scale and manner of Powell’s actions had “changed the Fed forever” and shared concerns that he had conditioned Wall Street to unsustainable levels of monetary stimulus to artificially support high asset prices. Bloomberg News called Powell “Wall Street’s Head of State”, as a reflection of how dominant Powell’s actions were on asset prices and how profitable his actions were for Wall Street. Powell is a registered Republican.
Early life
| Name | Jerome Powell |
| Net Worth | $50 million |
| Profession | Chair Federal Reserve |
| Height | 1.83m |
| Age | 70 years |
Jerome Hayden Powell was born on February 4, 1953 (age 70 years) in Washington, D.C., United States. He is one of the six children of Patricia Hayden; 1926–2010) and Jerome Powell (1921–2007), a lawyer in private practice. His maternal grandfather, James J. Hayden, was Dean of the Columbus School of Law at the Catholic University of America and later a lecturer at Georgetown Law School. He has five siblings: Susan, Matthew, Tia, Libby, and Monica.
In 1972, Powell graduated from Georgetown Preparatory School, a Jesuit university-preparatory school. He received a Bachelor of Arts in politics from Princeton University in 1975, where his senior thesis was titled “South Africa: Forces for Change”. In 1975–76, he spent a year as a legislative assistant to Pennsylvania Senator Richard Schweiker (R).
Powell earned a Juris Doctor degree from Georgetown University Law Center in 1979, where he was editor-in-chief of the Georgetown Law Journal. He moved to investment banking in 1984 and worked for several financial institutions, including as a partner of The Carlyle Group. In 1992, Powell briefly served as undersecretary of the Treasury for domestic finance under President George H. W. Bush. He was a visiting scholar at the Bipartisan Policy Center from 2010 to 2012. Powell built his reputation in Washington during the Obama administration as a consensus-builder and problem-solver.
Career
Jerome Powell moved to New York City in 1979 and became a clerk to Judge Ellsworth Van Graafeiland of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. From 1981 to 1983, Powell was a lawyer with Davis Polk & Wardwell, and from 1983 to 1984, he worked at the firm of Werbel & McMillen. From 1984 to 1990, Powell worked at Dillon, Read & Co., an investment bank, where he concentrated on financing, merchant banking, and mergers and acquisitions, rising to the position of vice president.
Powell worked in the United States Department of the Treasury between 1990 and 1993, at which time Nicholas F. Brady, the former chairman of Dillon, Read & Co., was the United States Secretary of the Treasury. In 1992, Powell became the Under Secretary of the Treasury for Domestic Finance after being nominated by George H. W. Bush. During his stint at the Treasury, Powell oversaw the investigation and sanctioning of the Salomon Brothers after one of its traders submitted false bids for a United States Treasury security. Powell was also involved in the negotiations that made Warren Buffett the chairman of Salomon.
In 1993, Powell began working as a managing director for Bankers Trust. He left in 1995 after the bank faced an upset when several wealth-generating customers opted-in to derivatives as their higher-risk/higher-reward-or-loss investment choice and realized the downside risk of large losses. He then went back to work for Dillon, Read & Co. From 1997 to 2005, Powell was a partner at The Carlyle Group, where he founded and led the Industrial Group within the Carlyle U.S. Buyout Fund. After leaving Carlyle, Powell founded Severn Capital Partners, a private investment firm focused on specialty finance and opportunistic investments in the industrial sector. In 2008, Powell became a managing partner of the Global Environment Fund, private equity and venture capital firm that invests in sustainable energy.
Between 2010 and 2012, Powell was a visiting scholar at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a think tank in Washington, D.C., where he worked on getting Congress to raise the United States debt ceiling during the United States debt-ceiling crisis of 2011. Powell presented the implications to the economy and interest rates of a default or a delay in raising the debt ceiling. He worked for a salary of $1 per year.
Federal Reserve Board of Governors
In December 2011, along with Jeremy C. Stein, Powell was nominated to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors by President Barack Obama. The nomination included two people to help garner bipartisan support for both nominees since Stein’s nomination had previously been filibustered. Powell’s nomination was the first time that a president nominated a member of the opposition party for such a position since 1988.
He took office on May 25, 2012, to fill the unexpired term of Frederic Mishkin, who resigned. In January 2014, he was nominated for another term, and, in June 2014, he was confirmed by the United States Senate in a 67–24 vote for a 14-year term ending January 31, 2028. Powell was a sceptic of round 3 of quantitative easing (or QE3), initiated in September 2012, although he eventually voted for it. In 2013, Powell made a speech regarding financial regulation and ending “too big to fail”. In April 2017, he took over oversight of the “too big to fail” banks.
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In a July 2017 speech, Powell said that in regard to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac the status quo is “unacceptable” and that the current situation “may feel comfortable, but it is also unsustainable”. He warned that “the next few years may present our last best chance” to “address the ultimate status of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac” and avoid “repeating the mistakes of the past”. Powell expressed concerns that, in the current situation, the government is responsible for mortgage defaults and that lending standards were too rigid, noting that these can be solved by encouraging “ample amounts of private capital to support housing finance activities”.
In an October 2017 speech, Powell stated that higher capital and liquidity requirements and stress tests from the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act have made the financial system safer and must be preserved. However, he also stated that the Volcker Rule should be re-written to exclude smaller banks.
Chair of the Federal Reserve
On November 2, 2017, President Donald Trump nominated Jerome Powell to serve as the chair of the Federal Reserve, replacing Janet Yellen at the helm of the central bank. On December 5, the Senate Banking Committee approved Powell’s nomination to be Chair in a 22–1 vote, with Senator Elizabeth Warren casting the lone dissenting vote. His nomination was confirmed by the Senate on January 23, 2018, by an 84–13 vote. Powell assumed office as chair on February 5, 2018.
In early 2018, one of Powell’s first actions was to continue to raise US interest rates, as a response to the increasing strength of the US economy. Powell has described the Fed’s role as nonpartisan and apolitical.
In 2018, for the first time since the financial crisis of 2007–2008, Powell reduced the size of the Fed’s balance sheet in a process called quantitative tightening, planning to reduce it from US$4.5 trillion to US$2.5–3 trillion in 4 years. Powell called the monthly reduction of US$50 billion as being “on automatic pilot”, however, by end of 2018 global asset prices collapsed; Powell abandoned quantitative tightening in early 2019, leading to a recovery in global asset prices.
In early 2018, Trump complained about the Fed raising interest rates, and in 2018 said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal that he “maybe” regretted nominating Powell, complaining that the Fed chairman “almost looks like he’s happy raising interest rates”.
In June 2019, Trump said, referring to Powell: “Here’s a guy, nobody ever heard of him before. And now, I made him and he wants to show how tough he is … He’s not doing a good job.” Trump called the interest rate increase and quantitative tightening “insane”. In July 2019, Powell said he would not stand down if Trump attempted to remove him, noting it was Congress that has oversight of the Fed. In August 2019, Trump called Powell an “enemy”, “equivalent to or worse than” China’s leader Xi Jinping, and that he had a “horrendous lack of vision”, and “I disagree with him entirely”.
In October 2019, as asset prices waned, Powell announced the Fed would return to expanding its balance sheet, which led to a global rally in assets. Powell said the Fed’s actions were not quantitative easing, but some dubbed them as being QE4. Powell’s expansion utilized an indirect form of quantitative easing, which printed new funds (per direct quantitative easing), but then lent them to US investment banks who made the asset purchases (as opposed to the Fed purchasing assets); it is known as a “repo trade”, and was associated with the “Greenspan put”.
In light of his term as chair expiring on February 2022, many Democrats began to express opposition to Powell’s reappointment. In August 2021, progressive Democrats, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, called on President Joe Biden to replace Powell, criticizing him for failing to “mitigate the risk climate change poses to our financial system”.
In September 2021, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, blasted Powell for his financial regulation track record and called him a “dangerous man to head up the Fed.” Powell was renominated for a second term by President Joe Biden on November 22nd, 2021 despite opposition from some Democrat senators such as Elizabeth Warren.
COVID-19 recession response
In early 2020, Powell launched an unprecedented series of actions to counter the financial market impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, which included a dramatic expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet and the introduction of new tools, including the direct purchase of corporate bonds, and direct lending programs. Powell emphasized monetary policy alone without an equivalent fiscal policy response from Congress would widen income inequality. Powell’s actions earned him bi-partisan praise, including from Trump, who told Fox News that he was “very happy with his performance” and that “over the last period of six months, he’s really stepped up to the plate”.
On November 19, 2020, after disagreeing with Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, Powell agreed to return unused crisis funds to the United States Treasury. Both he and Mnuchin then urged Congress to approve more stimulus. In August 2021, Powell expected the Fed to reduce economic support later in the year.
Asset price inflation
Jerome Powell accepted asset price inflation as a consequence of Fed policy actions to mitigate the financial market impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. He was criticized for using high levels of direct and indirect quantitative easing as valuations hit levels last seen at the peaks of previous bubbles. The Fed’s acceptance of asset price inflation from 2019 onwards resulted in levels of wealth inequality not seen in the United States since the 1920s. Fed asset purchases were also seen as contributing to the K-shaped recovery that emerged during the coronavirus pandemic, where the asset bubbles protected the wealthier segments of society from the financial effects of the pandemic, at the expense of most other segments, and particularly on the younger non-asset owning segments such as millennials.
In January 2021, Edward Luce of the Financial Times warned that the Fed’s use of asset purchases, and the resultant widening of wealth inequality, could lead to political and social instability in the United States, saying: “The majority of people are suffering amid a Great Gatsby-style boom at the top”. Powell’s use of indirect quantitative easing (or “repo trades”), from the “Greenspan, put”, created large profits for Wall Street investment banks. In June 2020, Jim Grant called Powell’s Wall Street Dr Feelgood.
In a September 2020 testimony, Powell said: “Our actions were in no way an attempt to relieve pain on Wall Street”. By the end of 2020, Wall Street investment banks recorded their best year in history, and Bloomberg called 2020, “.. a great year for Wall Street, but a bear market for Humans”. Mohamed A. El-Erian called Powell “a follower, not a leader”, of markets. Powell defended his actions saying: “I don’t know that the connection between asset purchases and financial stability is a particularly tight one”, and that he wasn’t worried that the Fed’s actions were creating asset bubbles.
In July 2020, CNBC host Jim Cramer said, “I’m sick and tired of hearing that we’re in a bubble, that Powell’s overinflating the price of stocks by printing money to keep the economy moving”. The Washington Post called the Fed “addicted to propping up markets, even when there is no need”. In August 2020, investors Leon Cooperman and Seth Klarman warned of a dangerous “speculative bubble”, with market psychology “unhinged from market fundamentals”.
In August 2020, Bloomberg News called Powell’s policy “exuberantly asymmetric” (echoing Alan Greenspan’s “irrational exuberance” quote from 1996), and that the “Powell Put” had become more extreme than the “Greenspan Put”. Steven Pearlstein in The Washington Post said that Powell had “adopted a strategy that works like a one-way ratchet, providing a floor for stock and bond prices but never a ceiling”, and that any attempt by Powell to abandon this strategy “will trigger a sharp sell-off by investors who have become addicted to monetary stimulus”.
By December 2020, Powell’s monetary policy, measured by the Goldman Sachs US Financial Conditions Index (GSFCI), was the loosest in the history of the GSFCI (goes back to 1987), and had created simultaneous asset bubbles across most of the major asset classes in the United States: For example, inequities, in housing, and in bonds. Cryptocurrencies also saw dramatic increases in price during 2020, leading Powell to win the 2020 Forbes Person Of The Year In Crypto.
Jerome Powell defended high asset prices in December 2020 by invoking the controversial Fed model, saying: “Admittedly P/Es are high but that’s maybe not as relevant in a world where we think the 10-year Treasury is going to be lower than it’s been historically from a return perspective”. The author of the Fed model, Dr Edward Yardeni, said Powell’s actions could form the greatest financial bubble in history, while the Wall Street Journal described Powell’s comparison as an attempt to “rewrite the laws of investing”.
In January 2021, investor Jeremy Grantham said markets were in an “epic bubble”, writing, “All three of Powell’s predecessors claimed that the asset prices they helped inflate in turn aided the economy through the wealth effect”, before eventually collapsing. Former IMF deputy director, Desmond Lachman, said that Powell’s monetary policy created “the mother of all bubbles in the world’s financial markets”. The Wall Street Journal wrote that Powell was comfortable maintaining quantitative easing, and did not see any risk from asset bubbles.
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In a January 2021 interview with Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Mohamed El-Erian said, “you have such an enormous disconnect between fundamentals and valuations”, and that the record highs in assets were due to the actions of the Fed and the ECB, clarifying “That is the reason why we’ve seen prices going from one record high to another despite completely changing narratives. Forget about the ‘great reopening’, the ‘Trump trade’ and all this other stuff”. The Financial Times capital markets editor described Powell’s January 2021 decision to keep buying assets in spite of bubble valuations, as creating a “Jenga-like structure” in credit markets.
In January 2021, Bloomberg News reported that “Pandemic-Era Central Banking Is Creating Bubbles Everywhere”, and called it the “Everything Rally”, noting that other major central bankers including Haruhiko Kuroda at the BOJ, had followed Powell’s strategy. Bloomberg News noted that “Powell, Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda, and other leading central bankers, though taken to task about bubbles in markets in recent months, have played down the concerns. In contrast, the Financial Times reported that the People’s Bank of China issued a bubble warning in January 2021 for several asset classes including equities and housing, and started the process of withdrawing liquidity (i.e. the reverse of a Fed put). Bloomberg News wrote that Powell, in the last year of his term, was afraid of a repeat of what happened in Q4 2018 when he started quantitative tightening.
In April 2021, Powell reassured concerns over a potential housing bubble, similar to the one that preceded the Great Recession. He stated, “we don’t see bad loans and unsustainable prices and that kind of thing.”
Wife
Jerome Powell is married to his longtime girlfriend Elissa Leonard, they had their wedding in 1985. Powell and his wife Elissa have three children and live in Chevy Chase Village, Maryland, where Elissa is chair of the board of managers of the village. In 2010, Powell was on the board of governors of Chevy Chase Club, a country club. He has served on the boards of charitable and educational institutions including DC Prep, a public charter school, the Bendheim Center for Finance at Princeton University, and The Nature Conservancy. He was also a founder of the Center City Consortium, a group of 16 parochial schools in the poorest areas of Washington, D.C.
Jerome Powell net worth
How much is Jerome Powell worth? Jerome Powell net worth is estimated at around $50 million. His main source of income is from his career as a Federal Reserve executive. Powell’s successful career has earned him some luxurious lifestyles and some fancy cars. He is one of the most influential people and the second-wealthiest member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, after Governor Randal Quarles. However, Powell was renominated for a second term by President Joe Biden on November 22nd, 2021.