For the record: Powell another strategic blunder.
— James E. Thorne (@DrJStrategy) January 12, 2026
Jerome Powell now finds himself served with subpoenas over the Federal Reserve’s renovation dealings and the accuracy of his related testimony, a development that lays bare just how far the Chair is willing to weaponize the…
For the record: Powell another strategic blunder.
Jerome Powell now finds himself served with subpoenas over the Federal Reserve’s renovation dealings and the accuracy of his related testimony, a development that lays bare just how far the Chair is willing to weaponize the principle of “Fed independence” as political armor. His reflexive dismissal of oversight as a partisan witch hunt evokes Shakespeare’s warning: “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” The louder Powell claims victimhood, the more it appears he’s attempting to obscure inconvenient truths rather than confront them.
The fundamental questions now facing Congress and the public are unavoidable: Did Powell misrepresent material facts under oath? And more broadly, has the modern Federal Reserve come to see itself as standing above constitutional accountability?
Under Powell, the Fed’s leadership has delivered an incoherent mix of academic orthodoxy and policy overreach. He unleashed punitive rate hikes that crushed the interest rate–sensitive backbone of the economy, housing, construction, and durable goods, even though those sectors were never the source of inflation. Powell’s Fed conveniently ignored a more uncomfortable reality: the fiscal excess engineered by two former senior Fed officials, Janet Yellen and Lael Brainard, whose pivot to the Treasury and White House directly fueled the inflationary surge. Their policies poured fiscal gasoline on an already overheated economy, yet Powell chose to deflect blame toward the private sector rather than confront the political establishment responsible for the crisis.
By choosing escalation over transparency, Powell has made a strategic blunder of historic proportions. In reaching for the nuclear defense of “Fed independence,” he may have ensured that this episode becomes his defining legacy, a reckoning that challenges not just the Chair himself but the very premise of unchecked Federal Reserve authority in a constitutional republic.
I warned ( and yes pundits heads exploded ) we were head for a constitutional crisis at the Fed, and just like Andrew Jackson, President Trump is up for the fight.
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