Get in boats & go: Powell likens Fed’s COVID response to Dunkirk

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell compared the Fed’s actions taken in the early US pandemic days to British World War II efforts to evacuate troops at Dunkirk.

United States Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell compared the actions taken by the central bank early in the coronavirus pandemic as the US economy barreled toward a recession to British efforts in World War II to evacuate troops at Dunkirk. Asked Thursday in a National Public Radio news interview whether he would have done anything differently back in March 2020 if given the chance, Powell said, “We almost certainly didn’t do everything right, but we knew at the very beginning that we should use all of our tools and use them as aggressively and extensively as we needed to.” The Fed slashed its key benchmark lending rate to a record low of 0 percent to 0.25 percent, created a number of emergency lending programmes to shore up a financial system in crisis and began buying billions of dollars in bonds to keep long-term interest rates low.