‘Get in the boats and go.” As the coronavirus pandemic upended global commerce in March 2020, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell repeatedly invoked the urgent British evacuations from Dunkirk in World War II.
This wasn’t the time, he said, to get hung up on the technicalities that central bank economists and lawyers love to chew over. Mr. Powell bluntly directed his colleagues to move as fast as possible. They devised unparalleled emergency-lending backstops to stem an incipient financial panic that threatened to exacerbate the unfolding economic and public-health emergencies.
