30 Facts You Probably Didn’t Know About Jerome H. Powell

19 December 2018, 9:47 am EST By Ruby Karnick

Jerome H. Powell, also known as Jay, is the current Chair of the Federal Reserve, serving from February 2018. It was in the year 1984 that Powell moved to investment banking, and since then has been working for several financial institutions. Here are some fascinating points to know about him:

Jerome Hayden "Jay" Powell was born on February 4, 1953, in Washington D.C. to Jerome Powell and Patricia (nee Hayden).
His father Jerome Powell was a lawyer in private practice and a World War II veteran. His maternal grandfather James J. Hayden was the Dean of the Columbus School of Law at Catholic University of America.
During his time at Princeton University, Powell focused on the prospects for political change in South Africa, which was at the time living under apartheid, as the main theme of his college thesis, "South Africa: Forces for Change."
Following his graduation from Princeton University in the year 1975, he worked for four months as a warehouse assistant at M.S. Ginn’s, an office-supply store, in Bladensburg, Md.
Powell has been on the board of several Washington-area nonprofits including the local chapter of the Nature Conservancy and several education groups.
Powell, around 20 years ago, reportedly chaired a group that raised over $30 million, at the request of the late James Cardinal Hickey, to help several struggling Catholic schools to stay open.
President Barack Obama nominated Powell, a Republican, to the Fed’s board of governors in the year 2012. It was the first time since 1988 that The President had nominated a new board member from outside his political party.
In the year 1992, for a brief period, he served as the Under Secretary of the Treasury for Domestic Finance under President George H. W. Bush.
President Donald Trump nominated Powell to the Fed Chair position and he was confirmed by the United States Senate.
Powell is the first chairman of the Federal Reserve in a span of nearly 40 years, to not to hold a Ph.D. in Economics.

In the year 1979, Powell earned a Juris Doctor degree from Georgetown University Law Center, and served as editor-in-chief of the Georgetown Law Journal.
In the year 1975–76, he served as a legislative assistant to Pennsylvania Senator Richard Schweiker.
Following his position of editor-in-chief in Georgetown Law Journal, Powell became a clerk to Judge Ellsworth Van Graafeiland of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
For two years from 1981, he was a lawyer with Davis Polk & Wardwell. Later in 1983, he worked with Werbel & McMillen.
He started his career in investment banking with Dillon Read & Co., where in a period of 6 years he rose to the position of vice president.
In the year 1990, he joined the United States Department of the Treasury, at the time Nicholas F. Brady, the former chairman of Dillon Read & Co was the United States Secretary of the Treasury.
In 1993, Powell started working as a managing director for Bankers Trust, but quit after 2 years when the bank faced trouble as several customers suffered losses due to derivatives.
For a period of 7 years, Powell was a partner at The Carlyle Group, where he was the founder of the Industrial Group within the Carlyle U.S. Buyout Fund.
Following his period in Carlyle, he founded Severn Capital Partners, a special private investment firm, with the focus on finance and opportunistic investments in the industrial sector.
According to the Bloomberg Intelligence Fed Spectrometer, Powell was rated as a Neutral - neither a hawk nor a dove, in comparison to the average member of the Board of Governors.

He was a visiting scholar at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a think tank in Washington, D.C., for two years from 2010, while simultaneously working on getting Congress to raise the United States debt ceiling during the United States debt-ceiling crisis of 2011. He worked for a salary of $1 per year.
Powell's nomination by the President Donald Trump, was approved by the Senate Banking Committee in a 22-1 vote, with Senator Elizabeth Warren casting the lone dissenting vote.
In a speech on October 2017, he stated that higher capital and liquidity requirements and stress tests have made the financial system safer and must be preserved. He also said that the Volcker Rule should be re-written to exclude smaller banks.
In the year 2008, Powell became a managing partner of the Global Environment Fund, a private equity and venture capital firm that invests in sustainable energy.
As per the public filings, Powell is the richest member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, with an annual income of US$199,700 and a net worth of $112 million.
He made a speech regarding financial regulation and ending "too big to fail" in the year 2013. Four years later, in April 2017, he took over the oversight of the "too big to fail" banks.
He seems to be "largely supportive" of the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, though he has already stated that it can be done even "more efficiently."
He married Elissa Leonard in the year 1985. The duo have three children, and currently reside in Chevy Chase Village, Maryland. His wife is a television and film producer and a local elected official in Chevy Chase Village.
He was the founder of the Center City Consortium, a group of 16 parochial schools in the poorest areas of Washington, D.C.
Powell is an avid cyclist, who has been known to ride his bike from his home in Chevy Chase to work at the downtown Washington headquarters of the Federal Reserve.