Jerome Powell has chaired the Federal Reserve for five years now. During hime time, he’s led the economy through a pandemic recession, decade-high inflation, and even a near banking crisis.
TheStreet’s J.D. Durkin sat down with Anthony Scaramucci, Former White House communications director at Collision in Toronto to grade Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell’s performance so far.
Full Video Transcript Below:
ANTHONY SCARAMUCCI: So it depends if it's semesters. You know what I mean? If you want to, I think he gets an overall grade of an A minus. But I think he starts out with a B and gets better over the pandemic. You know, if you broke it up into four semesters, he totally mis-sized the inflation situation, I don't blame him. I think J.D., one of the things you learn about when you're in the White House is that these people are operating with imperfect information. It's not like Hollywood where they have perfect information and then there's a happy ending.
You know, he was looking at the possibility of a supply chain reconnection in the first quarter of 2021, that did not happen. And so it's a butterfly effect sort of a thing because ultimately, a decision was made in China to keep the lockdowns for longer than the Fed expected. And they did that because they were worried about a national health care crisis. Ultimately, they didn't have enough hospital beds in China. That was the one piece of missing data that the Fed got wrong. So you can't overly blame them for that. So to me, I think they did generally a very good job A minus, but they started out, you know, it would be like the student got a B in the first quarter and the professor yelled at him and said, get your stuff together and they finished the year strong.
