#Quarles

Although the quadrennial kerfuffle over appointment of the Federal Reserve chair gets a good deal of public attention, I cannot recall a time when anyone outside banking’s inner circles cared much about who might be the next Comptroller or Vice Chair of Supervision.  And, although they’ve garnered more attention of late in the diversity context, Federal Reserve presidencies were of even less public interest.  Not only are all of these appointments now proving remarkably consequential, but they also pose a particularly thorny political equation for President Biden.

While all of these finance appointments are significant, that for Jay Powell as Fed chairman is of course the most important of them all.  Although key lips are publicly zipped, Treasury Secretary Yellen would like to see Mr. Powell’s reappointment as would a host of other high-impact Democratic influencers. The plethora of coverage suggesting global financial markets will collapse if Mr. Powell is deposed peddle patent nonsense, but nonetheless signify the stakes some assign to his cause.

Despite this formidable support, the Powell reappointment was still proving difficult even before the Reserve Bank stock-trading disclosures.  As I noted at the time, it’s a lot easier to understand individual financial bets than monetary-policy complexities.  It’s thus unsurprising that Mr. Powell’s latest concessions are proving far from satisfactory to an array of high-impact Democratic influencers very emphatically not to be found on Wall Street.  One of Mr. Powell’s strengths in the renomination battle has been divisions among Democratic progressives, making this resonant scandal particularly …