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Powell’s $2.5B Fed revamp denial exposes his privileged arrogance
Post Editorial Board | New York Post | 7-1-2025
Is Jerome Powell a liar or a fool?
The august chairman of the Federal Reserve Board Chair told the Senate Banking Committee last week, “There’s no VIP dining room, there’s no new marble. There are no special elevators” in the $2.5 billion renovation work at the central bank’s Washington headquarters.
“There are no new water features, there’s no beehives, and there’s no roof terrace gardens.”
In short, he categorically denied The Post’s reporting on the swanky “Palace of Versailles” redo — but without any explanation of why the project’s planning documents include all those features.
Those plans haven’t been revised since 2021, when the work began, with an estimated cost of $1.9 billion.
How did the price soar more than 30% if so many luxury items got dropped?
All the guy who literally controls America’s money supply could offer up was: “The cost overruns are what they are.”
“If you have a cost overrun over 10% you should be ashamed of yourself; 20%, you should not do any more jobs.”—President Trump during the July 8th White House Cabinet Meeting on California’s High Speed Rail Project That Never Was.
OK; the Fed chief may not have perjured himself; he may well not know what’s going on around him.
We’re pretty sure he knows how to read a spreadsheet — if he can be bothered to look.
Powell’s disdain for questions about the taxpayers having to shell out at least $2.5 billion for work on a single, four-story office building exposes him as an arrogant, privileged, bureaucrat who seems to think “civil servant” means he’s the one who gets served.
Let them eat cake!
The pricey makeover comes when the Fed is hemorrhaging money — a stunning $233 billion in losses in three years.
That’s thanks to high interest rates and the overhang from more than a decade of utterly unprecedented “quantitative easing” intervention in the private economy, which has left the Fed with a huge balance sheet of junk “assets” Powell keeps saying he’s going to unload soon.
Incidentally, The Wall Street Journal reports that the beehives (Italian beehives!) got added to the building’s roof back in 2023.
Maybe the chief never gets up there?
At a time when the Fed’s exercising entirely new powers, its chief can ill-afford to raise the question: If he doesn’t know what is happening on his roof, is he really on top of what’s going on under it?
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