Jerome Powell, the next chairman of the Federal Reserve, was a reluctant supporter of a third round of emergency bond purchases in 2012 as the U.S. economy struggled to recover from the global financial crisis.
Transcripts of the Fed’s closed-door policy meetings from 2012 show him arguing in September that fresh asset purchases could “have positive effects on the economy but that these effects are likely to be quite modest.” The Fed released the verbatim records for their policy debates on Friday with the customary five-year lag.
