저자: 미상 · 외국인
요약 보기
파월 연준 의장의 재임 평가: 코로나 대응은 신속·공격적이었다는 평가, 반면 인플레이션 대응 실패(transitory 발언, 평균물가목표제 등 정책 실수)가 핵심 유산. 워시 차기 의장 체제에서 기후 관련 정책은 되돌려질 전망. 파월은 조사 종료 전까지 이사회에 남겠다고 밝힘.
다듬은 글
What would you say to the criticism that by remaining on the board, you're actually taking a political act and denying President Trump the majority of the board, which as president, he would have if you left? You know, I'm literally staying because of the actions that have been taken. I had long planned to be retiring.
Jerome Powell's legacy really rests on two things. One, his critics will point out very quickly inflation went way up under his tenure. The other his supporters will say inflation went way down under his tenure, and that happened without causing a recession. Years later, it still hasn't materialized.
The US economy is humming along. As much as anything else I think is going to be remembered for failing on inflation. Transitory is going to be a word that will follow his legacy forever. But also, I think there was an issue of power. The president maintains authority over virtually every single body of power in the United States.
Powell pushed back in a way that almost nobody else has against the president. Powell was essentially a layman when it came to economics. He wasn't really the nerd economist that maybe people think he was schooled as a Fed governor and schooled in general economics. But he wasn't an economist the way his two predecessors were.
Ultimately, Obama brought him to the Fed. Trump made him Fed chair. Now, if we look back into the late teens, the Fed had been raising rates steadily, but ran into a wall when it looked like the economy was starting to weaken. This was basically the first time that President Trump first went after the Fed.
Powell has just really struggled with this during the course of his tenure, figuring out where that right interest rate level would be. The spread of the coronavirus has brought new challenges and risks. The virus and the measures that are being taken to contain it will surely weigh on economic activity both here and abroad for some time.
He'll be remembered for his actions during the Covid crisis. He was decisive. He was fast. He was aggressive. He took decisions that were not particularly politically popular at the time. We saw the deepest recession that we've ever seen, at least since the Great Depression, but also the shortest one.
Economy kind of came right back out of that. I think a lot of that was due to the fact that the Fed really didn't waste any time and just jumped right in there. We flash forward a couple of years and we run into this wall of inflation. How long does inflation have to run above your target before the Fed decides?
Maybe it's not so transitory. You're absolutely right. Inflation has run well above 2% for long enough. This, in hindsight, looks like a mistake in the wake of the financial crisis. In the years that followed, there was a lot of concern that maybe inflation would never even get up to 2%. Under Powell, the Fed made a new policy statement that said that occasionally it was okay to let inflation go up above 2%, as long as it's sort of evened out on average.
What they said in the new framework was that the Fed was going to be mindful of unemployment by different groups. In other words, it was a kind of wink and a nod to say, we're going to watch minority unemployment when we decide whether or not to raise interest rates. And these are things that Powell's critics say really caused him to take his eye off the ball.
Another thing that Powell did was get into international agreements with other financial institutions around the world to start talking about climate change and what climate risk means for different parts of the financial system. Definitely something that's going to be fully walked back under a Kevin Warsh Fed.
The fatal policy error going back 4 or 5 years is still a legacy that we're dealing with. We need, in my judgment, fundamental policy reforms to fix it. What Warsh can learn from Powell is to be humble before the fates of the economy. I think the lesson has to be don't be too doctrinaire or dogmatic about what you want to do policy wise, because reality has come along and change.
That. Historical precedent would suggest that Powell walks away when his term as chair is finished, however, he's going to stay for what he said was an indeterminate amount of time. I've said that I will not leave the board until this investigation is well and truly over with transparency and finality, and I stand by that.
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