Powell grilled on Fed's pandemic aid programs

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell testifies Wednesday in Washington during a House Select Subcommittee on the coronavirus crisis.
(AP/Kevin Dietsch)
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell testifies Wednesday in Washington during a House Select Subcommittee on the coronavirus crisis. (AP/Kevin Dietsch)

WASHINGTON -- Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell on Wednesday defended the Fed's efforts to support the economy during the pandemic-induced recession from assertions that its programs bungled aspects of its response.

A House subcommittee released a staff analysis that found that a program in which the Fed bought corporate bonds to try to support companies struggling in the pandemic included buying bonds of companies that laid off more than 1 million workers since March.

The report from the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis concluded that 383 companies whose bonds were bought by the Fed had continued to pay dividends to shareholders, with 95 of those companies also laying off workers. The report said fossil fuel companies accounted for 10% of the Fed's bond purchases even though those firms employ just 2% of the workers at larger companies.

"Many large layoffs have occurred among the companies whose bonds were purchased by the Fed, suggesting that the primary beneficiaries of the program have been corporate executives and investors not workers," the report said.

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Testifying on the second of three days to Congress about the government's rescue assistance, Powell took issue with the report's findings. The chairman said the Fed had structured its corporate bond purchases, spread in relatively small sums and covering more than 800 companies, to ensure that it wasn't favoring any particular companies. He noted that the corporate bond purchases were made in the secondary market and not directly from the companies.

"We didn't want to be deciding which companies to help," Powell said.

The chairman said the primary aim of this program was to provide a backstop at a time of turbulence in bond markets, and he suggested that this and other Fed programs had succeeded in stabilizing the markets.

Powell also faced pointed questioning Wednesday about the lackluster success so far of another Fed emergency program, the Main Street Lending Program, which has supplied few loans to medium-size businesses, its intended beneficiaries.

He said Fed officials needed to address numerous complications in setting up this program. He suggested that the small demand for these loans showed that the private markets were now doing an effective job in supplying loans to credit-worthy companies.

Powell's testimony this week comes as lawmakers are conducting oversight of the government's response to the pandemic. The Fed chairman and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin will testify to the Senate Banking Committee today.

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At its policy meeting last week, the Fed left its benchmark interest rate at a record low near zero and signaled that it planned to keep it that low through 2023. The central bank's policy statement also reflected its new policy goal of allowing its preferred inflation gauge to run above its 2% inflation target for a time to make up for the Fed's failure to achieve that goal over the past decade.

'DEEP HOLE'

In a separate appearance Wednesday, Fed Vice Chairman Richard Clarida said in an interview with Bloomberg television that "we're not going to even begin to think about lifting off, we expect, until we actually get observed inflation -- and we measure it on a year-over-year basis, equal to 2%." He said "we could actually keep rates at this level even beyond that."

Clarida said, "the economy is recovering robustly, but we are still in a deep hole."

Powell was pressed Wednesday by Democrats and Republicans to support proposals being floated to break a logjam that has kept Congress from passing a new relief bill, including federal benefits for the unemployed, after the expiration of an earlier rescue package.

The Fed chairman demurred, saying it was up to Congress to decide what should be included in any new measure. But he reiterated his belief that the economy will need more help to emerge from a recession that has left millions of people still unemployed and battered major portions of the economy.

Pressed by some lawmakers to offer ways to expand the Main Street lending program, Powell said that if the economy fares worse than the Fed expects in coming months, the Main Street program would be available to provide help to midsize businesses.

SMALL BUSINESSES AID

Powell said that for smaller businesses, the more effective means of support would be to make more loans available through the separate Paycheck Protection Program. Under this program, loans can be forgiven if businesses use the money to avoid laying off workers.

Boston Fed President Eric Rosengren suggested it'll take another wave of infections to prompt action and likely not until next year.

Declines in the stock market, until recently attributed to a reversal of excessive tech-share gains, have increasingly been attributed in part to worries about the recovery and the need for more stimulus. The S&P 500 Index slumped 2.37% Wednesday in New York, the fifth drop in six days.

"The most difficult part of the recovery is still ahead of us," Rosengren said in remarks Wednesday, saying he was more pessimistic than his colleagues over how many Americans will return to work over the next 15 months.

Information for this article was contributed by Martin Crutsinger of The Associated Press; and by Christopher Condon, Steve Matthews and Catarina Saraiva of Bloomberg News.

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell takes off his face mask to testify during a House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington on Wednesday, Sept. 23, 2020. (Kevin Dietsch/Pool via AP)
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell takes off his face mask to testify during a House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington on Wednesday, Sept. 23, 2020. (Kevin Dietsch/Pool via AP)
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell testifies during a House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington on Wednesday, Sept. 23, 2020. (Kevin Dietsch/Pool via AP)
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell testifies during a House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington on Wednesday, Sept. 23, 2020. (Kevin Dietsch/Pool via AP)

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