Jay Powell, the Prepster Banker Who Is Standing Up to Trump

At first glance, Jerome Powell doesn’t come across as a member of the #Resistance. Lean, angular, and somewhat awkward in public, the chairman of the Federal Reserve looks like a central-casting version of a Wasp banker from the nineteen-fifties. Actually, his paternal lineage is Roman Catholic: his uncle was a priest. Otherwise, though, Powell’s résumé fits to a tee that of an East Coast prepster: Georgetown Prep; Princeton; Georgetown Law; the law firm Davis Polk; the investment bank Dillon Read, where his mentor was Nicholas Brady, who served as Treasury Secretary under Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, and in 1990 gave him his first government job, as an Assistant Secretary for Domestic Finance. (Subsequently, Powell was promoted to Under-Secretary.) After leaving the Treasury in 1993, Powell, who is often referred to as Jay, returned to Wall Street. In 1997, he joined the Carlyle Group, a private-equity firm that was known for buying and selling defense businesses and making large profits. In 2005, he left and ran his own firm for a few years. Eventually, he joined the Bipartisan Policy Center, a centrist think tank, where his advocacy for fiscal prudence attracted the notice of Timothy Geithner, the Treasury Secretary in the Obama Administration. Although Powell was a registered Republican, in 2012 Obama appointed him as a governor on the Fed’s board, and in 2018 Donald Trump , much to his eventual regret, elevated him to chair. A little more than a year later, after the central bank had failed to cut interest rates as he demanded, Trump tweeted: “who is our bigger enemy, Jay Powel or Chairman Xi.” Which all adds up to this: Powell is an old-school establishment figure of the sort that Trump resents, and the bad blood between them, which spilled over last weekend, when the Fed chair revealed that the Justice Department had launched a criminal investigation into him, isn’t new. For a long time, Powell ignored Trump’s jibes and threats, which, after the latter’s return to the White House, escalated into personal insults and allegations that the Fed chair had grossly mismanaged a costly renovation project. Last year, Powell’s former boss, David Rubenstein, who co-founded the Carlyle Group, remarked, “Jay has been very good at basically keeping his head down, not criticizing anybody who’s criticizing him, and just dealing with the problems that the Fed sees.” This changed last Friday, when Jeanine Pirro, a lawyer and former Fox News co-host who is now the U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C., served the Fed with grand-jury subpoenas demanding documents relating to the renovation project and Powell’s statements to Congress. On Sunday night, Powell recorded a short video in which he broke the news about the subpoenas and said, “This new threat is not about my testimony last June or about the renovation of the Federal Reserve buildings. . . . Those are pretexts. The threat of criminal charges is a consequence of the Federal Reserve setting interest rates based on our best assessment of what...

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