Powell vs Putin: US Fed faces the great geo-economic transformation

[WASHINGTON, D.C.] Washington - It has become a cliché to insist that the chair of the US Federal Reserve, like other central bankers in the West, is an apolitical public servant, and that his colleagues at the Fed are "technocrats" whose decisions should not be influenced by political considerations like an approaching presidential election.

While that makes sense on some level, we all understand that central bankers read newspapers and watch television and are aware of what is happening around them, including the political reality, and have to take that into consideration.

Hence, current Fed Chair Jerome Powell understood that both Republican and Democratic administrations and Congress had no choice but to respond to the deadly global pandemic by spending trillions of US dollars and that he had to join their efforts by turning on the financial spigots. The public interest overrode real concerns that all of those steps would ignite inflation, exactly what the US central bank is supposed to prevent from happening.