Powell led the Fed’s fight against inflation. It’s not over yet — and it could get even harder

Washington (CNN) — Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell has steered the world’s most powerful central bank during a tumultuous period for the US economy, from the pandemic to a historic bout of inflation shortly after.

But the job isn’t finished yet.

Inflation is now well below the 40-year highs of 2022, when the US central bank kicked off an aggressive rate-hiking campaign that pushed interest rates to a bruising 23-year high. Tamping down inflation in just over two years without triggering a recession came despite warnings from critics and from Powell himself that such action could have created some “pain” for Americans.

And just when it seems like the central bank has tamed inflation — it’s currently a hair above 2%, according to the Fed’s preferred inflation measure — Powell’s Fed faces a new set of economic challenges. President-elect Donald Trump has threatened to impose hefty tariffs and carry out mass deportations, both of which could hike inflation back up and complicate the Fed’s job.

Trump’s pick for Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, has even pondered publicly how to undermine Powell’s influence before his term at the Fed ends in May 2026. Bessent said recently that he thinks Powell should finish his term.

James Bullard, who ended a 15-year term as president of the St. Louis Fed in 2023, told CNN that criticism the Fed pegged inflation as transitory in 2021 and thus was slow to act was “fair.” But Bullard, who voted on interest-rate decisions as part of the Fed’s policymaking committee, added that, with Powell at the helm, that same Fed also threaded the needle for a soft landing, when inflation is tamed without a recession.

Trump’s threats of stiff tariffs, if they become reality, could spark a global trade war, stoking inflation again.

At risk is the world’s biggest economy.

Powell’s big bets

The Fed’s main tool is its key interest rate, which influences borrowing costs across the economy. That tool is used to guide the economy toward the Fed’s two equal goals of price stability and maximum employment. The central bank balances its focus depending on which side of its dual mandate needs more attention.

For example, when employers shed more than 20 million jobs in the pandemic, the Fed focused on shoring up the labor market by stimulating the economy through lower rates. In 2022, when inflation reached a four-decade peak, the Fed cooled the economy by raising rates to tame demand.

However, it’s not always that simple. Enter Powell’s failed bet: He and other Fed officials thought inflation would normalize shortly after picking up in mid-2021 as the US economy ascended from pandemic depths. That didn’t happen, and inflation kept shooting up.

So the Fed began to raise rates in March 2022, but a few rate hikes didn’t stop inflation from ratcheting higher as gasoline prices topped $5 a gallon and consumer sentiment plummeted to a record low.

The Fed launched its most aggressive rate-hiking campaign since the 1980s, taking interest rates to a two-decade high in July 2023, where officials kept rates for more than a year.

Critics slammed both the Fed and Powell. Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, for example, regularly called him a job killer.

Economists across Wall Street predicted a recession as the central bank tried to cool the economy to slow the pace of inflation. Even many at the Fed expected a downturn at some point. But the economy proved remarkably resilient and kept growing instead.

Then came Powell’s next high-stakes wager: keeping interest rates high even as many economists called for cuts. The central bank waited until September to cut interest rates — more than a full year after it stopped raising rates. Officials then proceeded with two more cuts later in the year.

But inflation’s path next year is very much in question, not least because of President-elect Trump.

Powell is going to be tested again

Trump’s reelection comes with big implications for the US economy, the Fed and Powell himself.

Trump recently announced he intends to introduce a 25% tariff on all goods imported from Mexico and Canada, plus a 10% additional duty on goods from China. Economists expect those tariffs — plus other parts of Trump’s economic agenda, like mass deportations that could make it harder for employers to find workers — to push up inflation.

But many of those same economists praise the job Powell has done so far and told CNN they feel confident in his abilities to manage what comes next.

“He’s shown that he’s able to handle uncertainty and new situations by changing his mind fairly quickly,” said Bullard, who is now Purdue University’s dean of the Mitch Daniels School of Business.

Powell himself this month said there are still too many unknowns for the Fed to start considering the impact of Trump’s tariff threats.

“We don’t know how big they’ll be, we don’t know their timing and their duration, we don’t know what goods will be tariffed, we don’t know what countries’ goods will be tariffed, we don’t know how that will play into prices,” Powell said earlier this month at an event in New York. “That’s a partial list of the things we don’t know.”

But Powell is no stranger to uncertainty.

“If I were to describe Chair Powell in one word, it would be ‘nimble’,” Ellen Zentner, chief economic strategist at Morgan Stanley Wealth Management, told CNN when describing Powell’s skill at steering the Fed through uncertain moments. “And if you want to be nimble, you must be data dependent.”

Powell was appointed to lead the Fed by Trump himself, but the incoming president’s admiration soured the same year Powell began his term. In late 2018, Trump said Powell’s Fed “has gone crazy” for raising interest rates.

Since then, Trump has repeatedly floated the idea that the president should have some say in setting rates — despite the Fed’s long-running independence. That independence, in turn, reassures investors that monetary policy is set based on the economy, not on trying to curry short-term political favor with voters.

That’s been another hallmark of Powell’s approach: his commitment to the Fed’s independence in the face of pressure from Trump to go against the central bank’s mantra of making policy decisions based on data.

“We’re supposed to achieve maximum employment and price stability for the benefit of all Americans and keep out of politics completely,” Powell said at the New York event. “I think there’s very, very broad support for that set of ideas in Congress, in both political parties, on both sides of the Hill.”

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