This morning, Powell took the stage for the last time at the Axios Building press conference hall. Like every FOMC press conference over the past eight years, he stepped up, adjusted the microphone, and then began his statement.

This is Powell’s final public speech as Federal Reserve Chair. The agenda was a routine review of the FOMC’s interest rate decision and answering reporters’ questions. With only two weeks left before his official departure, everyone knew this would be a somewhat different press conference, but Powell still prepared some surprises beyond expectations.

The interest rate decision remained unchanged in the 3.5%-3.75% range, which was not surprising, but there were four dissenting votes within the committee — the most divided meeting since 1992. At the same time, he officially responded to market speculation that he would stay on at the Fed.

The last person to stay on as a board member after stepping down as Chair was Mariner Eccles in 1948, after whom the Fed building is named. From him to Powell, there’s been a 78-year gap.

Why did Powell choose to stay? Every story over these eight years begins with “Good afternoon.” It’s the opening line he has said countless times at the podium in the press hall, and it has become his most widespread and familiar memory on social media. But to understand the significance of his decision today, we need to turn back the clock eight years.

An Inadequate Chair

“I will do my best to fulfill the two main missions given to us by Congress: price stability and maximum employment.” — Jerome Powell, November 2, 2017 · White House Rose Garden Nomination Ceremony for Fed Chair

On the morning of February 5, 2018, Jerome Powell raised his right hand in a brief ceremony in a conference room on the second floor of the Axios Building. The ceremony lasted less than three minutes, with no president present, and was presided over by Fed Governor Randal Quarles, a less senior colleague. Two reporters took photos of the scene: deep blue suit, steady gaze, no one spoke.

That day he was 65 years old, officially succeeding as the 16th Chair of the Federal Reserve, with an annual salary just over $200,000. Judging by the standards of the previous four successors in this position, he seemed unqualified.

Greenspan earned a PhD in Economics from New York University and had spent thirty years in private economic consulting before his appointment — recognized in Washington and New York as a “market translator” before Reagan took office. Bernanke was a former chair of Princeton’s Economics Department; his 1980s paper on the Great Depression became the theoretical foundation for early 21st-century central bank policies. Yellen earned her PhD at Yale, spent most of her career as an academic at Berkeley Economics, and was the first woman to hold the chair.

Powell lacks an economics background; he studied political science at Princeton as an undergrad, then went on to Georgetown for a JD. Strictly speaking, he is a lawyer. During the Bush administration, Powell worked in the Treasury Department, reaching the position of Deputy Secretary, then spent nearly ten years as a partner at Carlyle Group. In 2012, Obama nominated him to the Fed Board along with a Democratic economist as a political balance. He served five years in that role without attracting much attention.

Looking further back, the only comparable case of a “non-economist” sitting as Chair was in 1978.

In March 1978, President Jimmy Carter appointed G. William Miller to the Fed. Miller was previously CEO of Textron, a defense contractor. Carter’s choice was partly because Miller had good relations with labor and was believed to be able to “control inflation without being too harsh.”

But Miller sat in that chair for only 17 months, during which CPI rose from 6% to 12%, and the dollar experienced the most severe crisis since WWII. In August 1979, Carter replaced him as Treasury Secretary, appointing Paul Volcker to lead the Fed. The subsequent events are now textbook: Volcker pushed rates to 20%, triggered a double-dip recession, crushed inflation, and ushered in the 1980s.

For nearly forty years after Miller, no non-economist sat in that chair. Until Powell.

During his five years as a board member, Powell was almost entirely transparent. From his swearing-in in May 2012 to his appointment as Chair in February 2018, he voted with the majority every time at FOMC meetings, never dissenting. His daily work involved technical issues like financial regulation and payment systems, far from the spotlight. Colleagues later recalled that what was most distinctive about him during this period was not his papers or speeches, but his calls. He wanted to bypass academic papers and official data, listening directly to market participants — calling bankers, bond traders, corporate CFOs. A director making dozens of such calls weekly, funded out of his own pocket, was something colleagues from academic backgrounds wouldn’t typically do.

On the afternoon of November 2, 2017, President Trump announced Powell’s nomination as Fed Chair at the White House Rose Garden. Trump delivered a forceful speech, Powell spoke with restraint, emphasizing “the dual mandate of employment and price stability.”

That evening, memos from major Wall Street traders to clients generally shared the same view: a continuation of the dovish stance, markets need not worry. Some economists, however, expressed concern in The New York Times about whether a lawyer could lead the FOMC at critical moments, but these worries quickly faded into the usual positive financial news.

Within a year of taking office, Powell made a structural change. He shifted the press conference after each FOMC meeting from four times a year to every meeting, and adopted everyday language, almost avoiding academic jargon. Greenspan’s proud “constructive ambiguity” communication style was abandoned from that year. But this new style hadn’t yet become routine when the pandemic hit in March 2020.

Unprecedented Choices

“We will persist until the job is done.” — Jerome Powell, August 26, 2022 · Jackson Hole Global Central Bank Conference in Wyoming

March 15, 2020, was a Sunday. Later that afternoon, Powell held an emergency FOMC meeting at the Axios Building — three days earlier than scheduled. The outcome announced was: federal funds rate cut by 100 basis points to 0-0.25%, launching $700 billion in asset purchases, and opening dollar swap lines with the five major central banks. It was the Fed’s most aggressive single move in history.

At that moment, COVID-19 was sweeping across the U.S., ICU beds were about to run out, the stock market had triggered circuit breakers twice in a week, and the Treasury market was experiencing liquidity shortages that chilled all traders’ spines. The world’s deepest market was suddenly nearly empty of buyers for U.S. Treasuries.

Over the next three weeks, Powell introduced nearly a new tool every few days. On March 17, a commercial paper funding facility; on March 19, a money market mutual fund liquidity facility; on March 23, unlimited QE, TALF reactivation, and Main Street Lending Program. These tools broke the Fed’s long-standing boundaries.

Buying corporate bonds was something Bernanke explicitly rejected in 2008 — bypassing banks to lend directly to small and medium enterprises, a step even the 2008 crisis didn’t take. During the fall of Lehman in 2008, Bernanke took nearly three months to launch the first round of QE, but Powell moved from an emergency rate cut on March 3 to unlimited QE in just 20 days.

On May 17, Powell appeared on CBS’s “60 Minutes” and said a phrase that would be repeatedly quoted later: “Our ammunition is not exhausted.” He wasn’t just shouting slogans; he was making a concrete promise to the market. In the following months, voices questioning whether he was “not acting like a Fed chair” finally quieted.

But his biggest mistake started from this silence.

In spring 2021, CPI year-over-year readings began to rise. 4% in April, 5% in May, 5.4% in June. Powell and his team believed it was “transitory.” They thought it was caused by pandemic disruptions to supply chains and would fade within a few quarters. This judgment wasn’t cold indifference but genuine belief. Powell repeatedly said in internal meetings that he was reluctant to crush a still-recovering labor market over temporary cyclical shocks. Millions who lost jobs during the pandemic were being rehired, many of them low-income workers.

Throughout 2021, the Fed maintained zero interest rates and continued buying $120 billion in assets each month. Powell explained in every press conference why raising rates should wait.

Inflation didn’t subside. September 5.4%, October 6.2%, November 6.8%. Skepticism returned in academia, Wall Street, and among Republican senators: a lawyer who doesn’t understand economists’ language had led the U.S. into an inflation crisis. Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers wrote in The Washington Post that he had never seen monetary and fiscal policies so disconnected from reality.

On the morning of November 30, Powell testified before the Senate Banking Committee. Asked about inflation, he said: “I think it’s probably time to retire that word (transitory inflation), and let’s try to be clearer about what we mean.”

This wasn’t a forced apology. No reporters pressed him, no lawmakers demanded he abandon “transitory.” He chose to say it himself.

After admitting the mistake, Powell acted quickly.

In March 2022, he raised rates by 25 basis points; in May, by 50; in June, by 75. This was the largest single hike since Greenspan’s tightening cycle in 1994. July saw another 75 basis points. The market initially interpreted this pace as “catching up,” expecting the Fed to soon return to a more moderate path. On August 26, the global central bank leaders’ closed-door meeting in Jackson Hole began as scheduled, with market expectations that Powell would soothe nerves and leave room for a “policy pivot.”

At 10 a.m., Powell took the stage to speak. Traditionally, such speeches last about half an hour, but that morning, Powell didn’t look at the teleprompter and spoke for only 8 minutes. He didn’t discuss academic frameworks, complex transmission mechanisms, or give any dovish hints — only three points: price stability is the Fed’s responsibility, rate hikes will bring pain, and we will see it through.

The last words of his speech were “We will persist until the job is done.” Those who understood immediately recognized it as borrowing from a former Chair’s language. “Keeping at it,” the title of Paul Volcker’s 2018 memoir. Volcker’s anti-inflation campaign in 1979, with rates soaring to 20% and the economy entering a double-dip recession, was summarized by those three words. Powell mentioned Volcker three times in his 8-minute speech, not comparing himself to him but choosing Volcker’s words as a closing.

On the day of the speech, the S&P 500 fell 3.4%, the Nasdaq dropped 3.9%. This was the market’s final disappointment in the “dovish continuation” promise.

He knew this speech would cause a decline, yet he said it anyway. It was the first time in four years as Fed Chair that he made clear he would not let his past define him.

After Jackson Hole, Powell’s rate hikes continued: 75 basis points in September, 75 in November, 50 in December. In March 2023, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) collapsed within 48 hours — the second-largest bank failure in U.S. history. Powell did something beyond market expectations: he created the Bank Term Funding Program (BTFP) to save banks while continuing to raise rates by 25 basis points.

This “dual approach” is hard to understand within traditional central banking frameworks, where liquidity rescue and tightening policies are usually opposed. But Powell is not a textbook operator. He sees “system stability” and “inflation targeting” as two separate issues: using one set of tools to rescue banks, another to curb inflation. It’s a lawyer’s tool-oriented thinking — choosing the right tool for each problem without letting the logic of one squeeze the other.

By the last rate hike in July 2023, the federal funds rate reached 5.25%-5.50%, the highest in 22 years. The entire tightening cycle accumulated 525 basis points.

Inflation finally started to decline. By June 2024, CPI YoY was back to 3.0%, and by year’s end, 2.9%. Unemployment remained near historic lows throughout the cycle, without the sharp rises typical of recessions. This was the Fed’s first time since the 1980s to bring down high inflation without causing a broad economic recession.

Economists debate whether he was “lucky,” arguing that pandemic shocks made his tools more effective than theory suggested, and falling energy prices helped. The debate will continue.

In his final press conference, Powell summarized these eight years: “We’ve actually experienced four supply shocks: the pandemic, Russia-Ukraine conflict, tariffs, now Iran and soaring oil prices. Each supply shock has the potential to push up inflation and unemployment, and it’s very difficult for central banks to know what to do.” It’s this macro environment, unprecedented in decades, combined with every historic, unthinkable action the Fed was forced to take, that made this morning’s committee the most divided since 1992.

But in those eight minutes on August 26, 2022, his judgment was real, his risk was real, and his choice not to be defined by his 2021 mistakes was genuine.

The Night Watchman Inside

“I will not resign.” — Jerome Powell, November 7, 2024 · FOMC Press Conference, responding to “Can the President fire the Fed Chair?”

On the afternoon of January 11, 2026, Powell recorded a video in a conference room at the Axios Building. The background was the Fed badge. He told the camera: “The criminal charges threaten the Fed’s authority to set interest rates based on our best judgment, not according to the President’s preferences.”

The video was posted that evening by the Fed’s official account. Financial media worldwide almost simultaneously made headlines. It was the first time in 113 years of Fed history that the institution publicly confronted the U.S. executive branch in this manner.

The trigger was a few days earlier. The U.S. Department of Justice issued a grand jury subpoena to Powell over the Fed’s renovation project, initiating a criminal investigation. The DOJ cited overspending and irregular procurement procedures as reasons.

But everyone knew what was really going on. Over the past twelve months, Trump repeatedly demanded Powell cut rates to support his tariffs. Powell maintained his pace, citing “no political considerations.” This criminal investigation was Trump’s retaliation after exhausting all normal means. Powell didn’t use the word “retaliation” in the video, but he spoke in plain language that almost everyone could understand.

To understand why this moment happened, we must go back eight years, to Powell’s first conflict.

In December 2018, Powell’s Fed raised rates for the fourth time that year, pushing the federal funds rate to 2.25%-2.50%. Markets had already tired of the tightening cycle; the S&P 500 entered a bear market the week before Christmas. Trump broke a decades-old tradition of not publicly criticizing Fed Chairs, launching a barrage of insults on Twitter. The words he used were unlike any previous president’s.

Over the following year, the Fed cut rates three times “preemptively,” each by 25 basis points, totaling 75 basis points. Was this capitulation? No consensus yet. Powell’s team explained it as a response to slowing global growth and weakening manufacturing PMI caused by U.S.-China trade tensions. But opponents argued that without Trump’s pressure, these cuts wouldn’t have happened.

Trump’s second term began in January 2025. This time, his pressure on Powell was not via Twitter but through a full administrative machinery.

In April 2025, Trump launched a new round of tariffs. The market expected this would boost inflation and suppress employment, trapping the Fed in a stagflation dilemma of “raising rates hurts jobs, cutting rates fuels inflation.” Trump repeatedly demanded Powell cut rates, hoping loose monetary policy would offset the negative effects of tariffs.

Powell responded in a speech at the Chicago Economic Club on April 16. He didn’t outright refuse to cut rates but used typical Powell plain language: “We are in a good position to wait for more clarity before considering any policy adjustments.” Mid-speech, he quoted a well-known Chicago movie line to ease tension: “As the great Chicagoan Ferris Bueller (from the movie ‘Ferris Bueller’s Day Off’) once said, ‘Life moves pretty fast.’” The audience laughed, but markets didn’t. Powell’s message was clear: the Fed wouldn’t panic and cut rates over tariffs.

In the following months, Trump repeatedly threatened to fire Powell. This was already addressed at the November 7, 2024, FOMC press conference. A reporter asked Powell: “If the President asked you to resign, would you?” He replied: “No.” Another asked: “Does the President have the authority to fire you?” He answered: “Legally, no.” Both responses were short and decisive, with no hesitation.

The last time a Fed Chair faced such intense political pressure was in the 1970s. Arthur Burns, a PhD economist from Columbia University, was then the Chair. His resume was typical for the role, but during Nixon’s presidency, he was pressured through private calls, memos, and White House staff to loosen monetary policy before the 1971-1972 elections. Nixon’s tapes later revealed he explicitly told Burns to “overheat” the economy for the election. Burns didn’t refuse. The result was a decade of stagflation in the U.S., until Volcker took over in 1979.

Burns was an economist; Powell is a lawyer. But faced with presidential pressure, Powell did what Burns did not.

The DOJ investigation ultimately failed. In March 2026, a federal judge dismissed the subpoena, citing “the sole purpose of the investigation was harassment and coercion,” and the DOJ quietly dropped the case. That same month, Powell was awarded the “Paul Volcker Public Integrity Award” in a small Washington hall. The ceremony was quiet and brief, with no media spotlight, attended by Volcker’s family, former Fed officials, and economists. The award honors those who maintain public integrity under enormous political pressure, and its final words are “Independence and integrity are inseparable.”

This award, named after Volcker, was given to Powell. During his tenure, despite pressure from Carter and Reagan administrations, Volcker never faced open insults, threats of dismissal, or criminal probes. But he only faced policy disagreements. Powell faced something more: personal attacks from the highest levels of U.S. politics.

After Volcker in 1979, the Fed established a boundary of independence from the White House, which remained unbroken during Powell’s eight years.

At today’s press conference, Powell directly addressed a question that had been circulating for weeks: he would not leave the Fed on May 15. He would resign as Chair but remain on the Board of Governors, with an indefinite term. His reason was straightforward: “The events of the past three months left me no choice but to stay until these issues are resolved.” This was three months after the DOJ subpoena was served.

He used his last act as Chair to prevent his departure from creating a vacancy for the administration. He declared he would not be a “shadow Chair.” His goal was not influence over monetary policy but to keep the position of the night watchman filled.

On May 15, he would still move out of the Chair’s office, leaving it to Kevin Waugh. But Powell’s desk would not leave the Axios Building — just move to another floor, another room.

“Good Afternoon”

At today’s press conference, someone directly asked Powell how history would judge his eight-year tenure and legacy. He simply replied, “Let others decide.”

Eight years ago, when Powell first sat in this office, no one thought he would make it this far. Over those years, he faced an unforeseen pandemic, an inflation thought to be temporary, and political pressure that nearly shattered the Fed’s independence. But May 15 is not the end — it’s more like halftime. After Powell steps down, the forces that pushed him into the corner are still there, and he leaves the market with three questions.

The first is: how long can his current monetary policy framework last? In August 2020, Powell announced at Jackson Hole that the Fed would adopt a “flexible average inflation targeting” approach, allowing inflation to run modestly above 2% for some time. This framework made sense in a low-inflation environment, but the high inflation of 2021 made it seem sluggish. The FOMC has begun internal reviews. The next Chair will decide whether to modify, keep, or abandon it.

The second is: the independence of the central bank. Over the past eight years, Powell resisted almost all forms of White House pressure. He used “no,” “not allowed by law,” and “that’s not our job” to defend the Fed’s independence. But that boundary is now at a new level. It has not been broken, but it’s no longer a given. The next Chair will enter office knowing the White House might intervene.

The third is the hardest to answer: what kind of political climate will the next Chair face? Trump’s second term has two years left. Whoever takes over will not have the calm start Powell had. Instead, they will face the various tests accumulated from 2018 to 2026 — and these will return in the future.

During Powell’s eight years, a popular meme on social media would resurface after every meeting. The GIF background shows the Axios press hall, Powell walking to the podium, adjusting the microphone, and saying two words: “Good afternoon,” followed by a rapid market plunge.

This meme first appeared in December 2018, mocking Powell’s tendency to cause stock declines with every speech, calling it “Powell’s crash.”

But over eight years, its meaning has changed.

The lawyer once considered “not qualified” endured the crash during the pandemic, admitted mistakes during inflation, and corrected them at record speed. He held the line against all White House pressure. Every time he stepped to the podium and said those two words, he knew markets would fall and the President would criticize him on Twitter. But he always showed up.

That joking opening line ultimately became the simplest and most powerful promise of an era. He never learned how to make markets fall less, but he always appeared on time.

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