Big Yellow Taxi begins with a lament. Joni Mitchell warns that “you do not know what you’ve until it is gone”. A line that has become cultural shorthand for the unnoticed blessings of daily life. Monetary stability belongs in that category. It is the background hum that makes everything else possible. It is also something the country nearly lost. This letter is an acknowledgment of the man who kept it from slipping away.
Chair Powell, this is a note of appreciation. Not adulation. Not partisanship. A simple acknowledgment that your stewardship of the Federal Reserve belongs in the same historical conversation as Paul Volcker’s tenure. The scale of the challenges you faced and the weight of the decisions you carried make that comparison unavoidable.
Americans rarely see the Federal Reserve’s work. They see mortgage rates, grocery prices, credit card statements and the cost of a home equity loan. They do not see liquidity operations or debate transcripts from the Federal Open Market Committee. The architecture of stability is invisible when it works and hated when it changes. That invisibility hides the truth. Monetary policy is the quiet force that holds up the scaffolding of the modern economy. Your tenure tested that scaffolding harder than any period since the early 1980s.
The first test arrived in 2020 when the global economy entered a self-imposed shutdown. Markets seized. Entire sectors collapsed. The economy stopped. You responded with speed and precision. Rates were cut to zero. Emergency credit facilities opened. The Fed’s balance sheet expanded at a scale that was unprecedented. These actions stabilized a collapsing system. They preserved jobs and prevented an avalanche of corporate failures. They bought time for a country that had no roadmap for restarting itself.
A very different test arrived as the pandemic receded. Inflation returned violently after three decades of dormancy. Prices rose across every category. Households felt the pressure. Political actors demanded simple answers. You confronted a problem that looked and felt like the early 1980s, yet the surrounding conditions were nothing like that decade. You made decisions with full knowledge that each rate hike carried political heat and market risk. You invoked Volcker’s legacy for a reason. The Fed’s credibility on price stability was on the line. You defended it. You reminded the country that central bank independence has real meaning. You accepted the criticism that comes with doing something hard and necessary.
The result is a story that economists will study for a generation. Inflation fell from nine percent to the mid twos without a recession, without mass unemployment and without the social fracturing that usually accompanies a major tightening cycle. This was not luck. This was not a soft landing in the cliché sense. It was a demonstration of technical competence, institutional credibility and a refusal to be guided by the politics of the moment. The outcome remains one of the most precise balancing acts in the modern history of monetary policy.
Your term as Chair will end in 2026. The public record will say you guided the Federal Reserve through a global pandemic, the worst inflation shock in forty years and the transition back toward monetary normalcy. History will see the outcomes. It will not see the pressure. That is the nature of central banking.
A simple truth emerges once the noise fades. The country kept something essential because you refused to let it go. Stable prices. A functioning labor market. A financial system that did not buckle under stress. It is easy to forget how fragile these things are. It is easy to criticize the person who guards them. It is much harder to acknowledge that someone can serve the country by preventing disasters that most citizens never see.
Big Yellow Taxi is a reminder to value the ordinary blessings before they disappear. Monetary stability is one of those blessings. Thank you for preserving something we do not want to learn to miss.