Fed Chair Powell's legacy may be calmly navigating crazy times

Today was Jerome Powell's last press conference as Fed Chair. He has a few more weeks to serve as chair, after which he'll step down to a place on the Fed committee. No previous Fed Chair has stayed on the committee but Powell feels that until the Trump administration's legal charges against him are completely removed, he is safer on the Federal Reserve Board. Powell - and every reasonable economist - is still arguing for Fed Independence, something Trump is eager to compromise for the sake of short-term economic stimulus (the cost of which would be long-term inflation).

Powell had some weird events to navigate. The most obvious being COVID and then Trump and his tariffs and then of course Trump's attacks on Powell in the form of criminal charges against Powell - another first for any president by Trump and his boys.

Powell's term coincided with the most tumultuous economy in modern times, largely thanks to COVID. The jump in unemployment from 3.5% in February 2020 to 14.7% in April 2020 was a 10.3 percentage point increase in two months, which has no precedent in the seventy-plus years of modern data collection. (The number of the unemployed surged to 23.1 million, a jump of 15.9 million in a month.)

Inflation, too, was wildly volatile - going from roughly 2% to nearly 0% before spiking to 9% during the peak of the COVID stimulus and supply chain shocks. It is still more than 3%. (Had Trump not imposed tariffs and then invaded Iran, inflation would have likely hit 2% or lower by now.)

Finally, here are two tables. One shows numbers at the start and end of his time as Fed Chair. The other shows the dramatic extremes during his time as Fed Chair. It was a crazy time for the economy and Powell likely navigated this as calmly as anyone might have. And that calming influence during serious stress tests might be his most important legacy.

The World Belongs to Optimists

"The world belonged to optimists; pessimists were only spectators."

- The Economist, capturing the philosophy of recently deceased emerging markets investor Mark Mobius

We Stand United King Charles Claims

Headline: "We stand united": King Charles praises US-UK ties in rare address to Congress amid political tensions

Commentary: To be fair, both countries do have the word in their names. 

Roger Bacon and the Worst Kind of Ignorance

The analyst Robert Fox recounts Roger Bacon, writing in 1267, identifying what he considered the worst form of human error: "men blinded in the fog of their errors do not perceive their own ignorance, but with every precaution cloak and defend it so as not to find a remedy."

That is, men ignorant of how ignorant they are fight to protect that ignorance from any perceived attack or real change.

Free Will

 Just published: Free Will Is an Illusion (I had no choice but to write this)

From Impersonal Bureaucracy to the Politics of Theater

FDR-era programs treated coverage as a right of citizenship. You were entitled to help because you were  a citizen, not because you had made yourself a sympathetic character.

GoFundMe operates on a different theory of justice. You receive help if you can make the proper appeal, hold attention, move strangers. If you cannot perform — or will not — you do not get help. The illness is the same. The capacity to win an audience is what changes the outcome.

The Information Economy requires us to perform. To get attention. To provoke emotions. To compete on the stage of politics as theater.

FDR and LBJ's bureaucracies were impersonal but reliable. Those generations did not have to perform. They were citizens, and citizenship was enough. Now you have to be more than a citizen. You have to be a story worth telling.

What Makes Us All the Same? The Fact That We're All Different

Hannah Arendt, on what makes political life possible: "Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live."

Curious claim. What is it that makes us all the same? The fact that we are all different. I'm sure that claim will strike you differently than it did me.

Harry Frankfurt and the Desires We Have (and the Desires That Have Us)

Harry Frankfurt argued that what makes someone a person - rather than just a wanton creature of impulse - is the capacity to have preferences about one’s preferences: to want to be different from how one is.

We don’t just have desires; we have desires about the kind of desires we have and and even about the desires that have us.

A Theory About Conspiracy Theories

Generating and sharing conspiracy theories — like a rain dance — gives people something to do while they wait for systems that are too opaque to understand or petition. And it builds community — even if, in contrast to a rain dance, it does less for fitness and cardio.

Get Rich Quick

Get-rich-quick schemes are structurally similar to get-poor-quick schemes.

The Odds of Fame and Friendship

"Everyone we hear of is famous. Which wildly skews our sense of how probable success actually is. Of the 8 billion people on this planet, 99% are not famous."

"Well, not everyone we hear of is famous. Most are friends."

Pause.

"Well, that wildly skews our sense of how friendly people are. 99.9999% of people don't even know we exist."

The Economist Forecasts Probable Democratic Win of House in 2026 Election

 The Economist’s new statistical forecast of the 2026 Congressional elections gives Democrats a whopping 95% chance of gaining at least the three seats needed to flip the 435-seat lower house. More surprisingly, despite a Senate map that looks nearly impregnable on paper, the model estimates that the party has a 46% probability of taking over the upper chamber as well.

Information More Important Than Government?

Thomas Jefferson deplored "the putrid state into which our newspapers have passed." And yet he believed it was better to have "newspapers without a government" than "a government without newspapers."

Perhaps that's unsurprising from a man whose personal library became the founding collection of the rebuilt Library of Congress. A man of books understood that if you had to choose between information about the world and a government to govern it, information would do more to shape how people actually lived.

A man who deplored the press still trusted it more than he trusted power.

(Quotes from John P. Kaminski's The Quotable Jefferson.)

US GDP and Wealth of Top 0.1%

US GDP last year: $30.5 trillion.

Wealth held by top 0.1%: $24.9 trillion.

The Possible Revival of Defenestration

In the Defenestration of Prague, Protestants settled a religious dispute by picking up three Catholic officials and throwing them out a third-story window. They survived the seventy-foot fall by landing in a pile of dung. (Catholic accounts at the time credited angelic intervention, and this may have been the first recorded instance of one side calling the other's claim bullshit.)

It leaves me wondering why we traded this for memes and marches.

Artificial Intelligence - Created to Navigate the Information Economy

The Information Economy is unusually hard to condense. It has the potential to sprawl into gigabytes of observations, accounts, stories, mediums, and tactics — magazines and radio, billboards and pop songs, talk shows and movies, documentaries and fantasies, memes and research.

The intelligence in our heads is no longer enough to process all this. We are now manufacturing artificial intelligence to handle the sprawl — the gigabytes of noise and narrative the Information Economy produces faster than any human mind can sort.

In The Lincoln Lawyer, a character delivers the line: "Whoever controls the media controls the mind." A companion asks, "Did you just quote Stalin?" "Um," she replies. "Jim Morrison."

The exchange is funny because both answers are almost right. Stalin didn't say it, but the regime he built behaved as if he had. Morrison did say it — around 1969 — but variations were already circulating for more than a decade before he used it. In 1961, a Baptist editor named E. S. James told the Southern Baptist Convention that "those who control the media of communication will ultimately control the minds of the people." And a 1967 newspaper advertisement in Ohio declared that "our country is run by men who control our wealth; who control our news media and thus control our minds."

Just as Americans once staked claims on a continent, a host of interest groups now stake claims on attention — defining terms, controlling narratives, racing to plant their flag in your mind before someone else does. Advertising, marketing, politics, investor sentiment: in every one of them, the good things go to whoever captures your attention first.

Attention: the last zero-sum domain.

So what do we do in a world with this much information — most of it made rather than found? We make intelligence to match.

Natural intelligence evolved to navigate the natural world. Artificial intelligence is built to navigate the worlds we've built — machinery and code, social norms and institutions.

Archimedes said: give me a lever long enough, and I can move the world. Artificial intelligence is that lever — not for moving the physical world, but for moving the ones we've built inside it: the private worlds of our imaginations, the shared worlds of our institutions.

Wake Up Call

Me: I guess nobody needs a wake-up call anymore, now that everyone has a phone.

Hotel desk clerk: Oh, people still need a wake-up call. They just don't think to ask for one anymore - which suggests they're now at least two calls away from self-awareness.

The Strange Debate About God and Presidents That Persists

It is so bizarre that in 2026 we are still debating whether religion is a private or public matter.

Our founding fathers would likely marvel at our technology and be aghast at our medieval take on politics and religion. "What strange intersection of intellect and superstition gives you a culture that can use AI to generate a picture of your president as Jesus?"