Powell's tenure as Fed chief, bookended by Trump, draws to a close

Added: 2026-05-21

[00:00:00]Jerome Powell's tenure as Fed chair comes to a close Friday and what's distinguished him perhaps most of all from his predecessors is just how public facing he's had to be throughout it.

[00:00:10]There was COVID-19. This forced the Fed into a dramatic expansion of its presence in the economy and Powell going on 60 Minutes to explain we will be there, we will do what's necessary to keep this economy afloat throughout this. And then there was the inflation that followed it and this forced it into another mold, that of saying listen, we will fix this. And in a sense take the heat for letting inflation get out of control in the first place. He was appointed to the role by President Trump. Pretty quickly ran into conflict with the president.

[00:00:38]>> He's terrible. It started with words.

[00:00:41]Trump has been berating him, calling for rate cuts, calling him an enemy of the people.

[00:00:45]>> 3.1 billion went up a little bit or a lot. It eventually morphed into a legal assault as well. Trump tried to fire one of Powell's colleagues. And then there was a criminal investigation of Powell himself.

[00:00:56]>> This unprecedented action should be seen in [music] the broader context of the administration's threats and ongoing pressure. That's one aspect of his chairmanship that really kept him in the public eye. Powell has met more lawmakers and more often with members of the Senate than any of his predecessors and that has probably stood him in good stead when it came to sort of resisting some of these efforts by Trump to erode the Fed's independence and really try to fire him from the board. Trump's appointee to succeed Powell, Kevin Warsh, was held up in the Senate until that investigation got dropped.

[00:01:29]>> Let's get Warsh in there and do that by eliminating a bogus investigation [music] that started this whole drama.

[00:01:34]>> Kevin Warsh has had his nomination approved by the Senate. He's got an immediate problem with inflation.

[00:01:39]Numbers that have been coming out over the last few months really have not supported the narrative that inflation would peak because of tariffs and oil prices. So far from being able to cut rates as President Trump still says he expects and he may face some growing sentiment among his colleagues to begin indicating that they may actually have to raise interest rates.