Toward the end of an April 16 interview on a Chicago stage, Jerome Powell took a break from meditating on monetary policy to talk about how he unwinds after a hard day at the office.
“I play one of my guitars,” the Federal Reserve chairman said. “I do Zoom calls with my kids and my grandkids. And I go to the gym a lot, too, just to stay in shape.”
Jerome Hayden “Jay” Powell, 72, has been Fed chair since 2018. Between the 2020 COVID-19 crisis, the 2022 inflation crisis and occasional spats with President Trump, Powell has put in some time at the top of the news.
Powell now enjoys sufficient fame that his surname can stand alone in a headline. Most Americans know who he is.
Or do we?
Need a break? Play the USA TODAY Daily Crossword Puzzle.
A quick web search unearths few in-depth profiles of Powell, and scant details of his personal life. It’s not necessarily that Powell is an especially private man: More likely, it’s that he was not particularly well-known when he took charge of the nation’s central bank. Profilers were more interested in his theories on interest rates and inflation than his hobbies or favorite band.
Here, then, are five things to know about Jerome Powell.
Powell is a Deadhead
The financial world snapped to attention in June 2023, when someone snapped a blurry picture of a man who fit Powell’s description – think of a sharply dressed high-school math teacher in the Eisenhower era – at a Dead & Company show in Virginia.
Upon subsequent questioning, Powell revealed that he is a lifelong fan of the Grateful Dead.
“I saw them a bunch of times,” Powell told an audience at a recent journalism conference. “I know every note on every song from that era.”
By “that era,” Powell referred to the classic Dead years of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Among Dead albums, Powell avowed a preference for the 1970 masterpiece “American Beauty” to the weaker late-‘70s entry, “Terrapin Station.” He chided his questioner for posing a choice between two records of such divergent quality.
“Ask me a hard one,” Powell quipped.
In the same exchange, Powell made this declaration: “I don’t have any Dick’s Picks.”
If you don’t know what that means, you are not a Deadhead.
Powell is a musician
We already know, based on Powell’s April 16 comments, that the Fed chairman owns multiple guitars and plays them to decompress after a stressful day at work.
We do not know how many guitars Powell owns, or whether he prefers Gibson to Fender. If he is a fan of early-‘70s Dead, then surely Powell has acquired something like the 1955 Fender Stratocaster that Garcia favored in that era, a gift from fellow pop star Graham Nash. But that is only speculation.
We do know, from a 2017 Wall Street Journal profile, that Powell played guitar in a rock and roll band. More than one, apparently.
Powell once spoke of starting a Federal Reserve Band, whose members would have included Richard Clarida, a fellow Fed board member and noted singer-songwriter. Alas, Clarida left the Fed in 2022.
Powell is an avid cyclist
It’s eight miles from Powell’s Chevy Chase home to his office at the Federal Reserve in Foggy Bottom. According to a New York Times profile, Powell used to enjoy commuting to the Fed on his bicycle.
Ascension to the chairmanship may have put the kibosh on that routine: Powell now has a security detail.
The Powells survived epic dog park kerfuffle
As we said, Powell lives in Chevy Chase, arguably D.C.’s premier suburb. In 2019, Elissa Leonard, Powell’s wife, became embroiled in a controversy over a new Chevy Chase dog park.
Leonard was (and evidently still is) chair of the Chevy Chase Village Board of Managers. She sat at the center of a debate over the fate of the dog park, which set neighbor against neighbor in an ugly outbreak of animal animus, to quote the Washington Post.
The board ultimately voted to “disestablish” the dog park, to a chorus of boos from dog partisans.
Powell likes purple ties
At the same journalism conference where Powell declared his love for the Dead’s “American Beauty,” a reporter pressed him to explain his preference for purple ties.
Powell is often photographed in purple ties: They have become a sort of trademark.
Why purple? The color would make sense for a Northwestern University graduate. But Powell attended Princeton (orange and black) as an undergraduate, and Georgetown (blue and grey) for law school.
“At the beginning, the only significance was that I like purple ties,” Powell explained. “And then it becomes a thing.”
As it turns out, there is a sound political reason for Powell’s purple. Democrats favor blue ties. Republicans prefer red. Powell and his central bank are “strictly nonpolitical,” he said. “Purple is a good color for that.”
Powell worked in a warehouse
There was a brief moment in 1975, after he graduated from Princeton and before he went to Georgetown for law school, when Jerome Powell worked for a humble hourly wage.
Powell spent four months as a warehouse assistant at M.S. Ginn’s, an office supply company in the D.C. suburbs.
Powell even listed the gig in nomination papers for the Fed chairmanship. You’ll see it on Page 45 of the transcript of the Senate hearing, on the first line of a list of increasingly weighty jobs.
