Jerome Powell — the guy sitting on somewhere between $20 million and $112 million in personal wealth, depending on who’s counting — rolled into Harvard University this week to deliver some advice to struggling American families: just wait it out.
That’s rich. Literally.
The Federal Reserve Chairman, whose $5.14 million Chevy Chase mansion features two swimming pools, a tennis court, and a bowling alley, told a room full of Ivy League undergraduates that the proper central-banking response to an energy shock is to simply ride it out. Not fix it. Not act. Just wait. The man has $9 million in cash sitting around and a $23 million stock portfolio, so yeah — waiting is pretty comfortable when your couch costs more than most people’s cars.
Meanwhile, back in the real world where the rest of us live, the national average for a gallon of regular unleaded just smacked $3.99 and is about to blow through the $4 wall any day now. One month ago it was under three bucks. That’s a dollar-per-gallon jump in thirty days, for anyone keeping score at home.
Oil surged nearly 5% to over $104.50 a barrel. Diesel could hit $6. Analysts at Australia’s Macquarie Group warned that if conditions deteriorate further, oil could rocket to $200 a barrel — which would put gas somewhere around $7 per gallon. Californians are already staring down $4.81, because of course they are.
But sure, Bicycle Jay. We’ll just wait.
You know what’s incredible about Powell? He already ran this exact con once. Remember “transitory”? Back in 2021, when inflation started eating Americans alive, Powell assured everyone that rising prices were just a blip. A hiccup. Nothing to see here, folks. Go back to sleep.
Translation: “I have absolutely no idea what’s happening, but I’m not going to do anything about it and hopefully you’ll forget I said this.”
We didn’t forget. Inflation hit 9.1% before he finally dragged himself off the golf course and started raising rates. By then, a pound of ground beef went from five bucks to eight. Eggs hit six dollars a dozen. And if you think that didn’t matter, you’ve never watched a mom stand in the grocery aisle doing math on her phone trying to figure out how to feed three kids on what’s left after the electric bill.
That was Powell’s “transitory” in action. Now he’s dusted off the same playbook and slapped a new label on it. “Wait them out” is just “transitory” wearing a fake mustache.
Oh, and guess where he delivered this little gem of wisdom? Not at a town hall in Toledo. Not at a diner in rural Pennsylvania where people actually pump their own gas. He chose Harvard. These kids’ parents are dropping sixty grand a year so their precious babies can sit in a lecture hall and hear a guy worth nine figures explain why doing nothing is actually a sophisticated strategy.
Bravo, Jay. Really connecting with the common folk there.
The man reportedly bikes to work sometimes. Celebrity Net Worth shared that little nugget like it makes him relatable — oh, how wonderful, the chairman doesn’t even need gas! He pedals his bicycle from his mansion in one of the wealthiest zip codes in America to the building where he decides monetary policy for 330 million people. When asked about his expenses, Powell once said that if his family spending exceeds his salary, “we have to sell an asset.”
Somebody start a GoFundMe for the man. The agony of liquidating a tiny slice of a $23 million stock portfolio. How does he sleep at night? (On 1,200-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets in his Vermont vacation home, probably. You know, for when the Chevy Chase bowling alley gets boring.)
His official salary is $250,600, but his total annual income from investments reportedly exceeds $4 million. And this is the guy telling a single mom in Phoenix paying $60 to fill up her minivan that patience is a virtue. Unreal.
None of this happened in a vacuum, by the way. This is the same Federal Reserve that printed trillions of dollars to bankroll the Democrats’ spending bonanza under Biden, then acted shocked — absolutely stunned! — when prices went through the roof. Powell sat there and did nothing while Democrats rammed through spending bill after spending bill, and now he wants credit for “managing” the consequences of his own incompetence.
Powell’s approval rating has cratered to the lowest of any Fed Chair since Gallup started measuring in 2001. Only 44% of Americans have any confidence in him. President Trump said Powell “has made a lot of bad decisions” and that “his termination cannot come fast enough.” Kevin Warsh, Trump’s nominee to replace him, is stuck in Senate limbo because Sen. Thom Tillis is blocking the confirmation over a DOJ investigation.
So what did Chairman Wait-It-Out do? He invented a title for himself — “chair pro tempore” — and declared he’d stay in power even after his term expires in May. There is zero legal precedent for this. So he won’t do anything about the economy AND he won’t leave? Pick one, Jay. Actually — pick the second one.
He’s like a squatter, except the squat costs us trillions.
“Prices go up like rockets, and they come down like a feather,” said USC supply chain expert Michael Mische. Finally — ONE guy in a university somewhere actually said the obvious thing out loud. Powell won’t even give us that much. He just smiles, tells Harvard kids everything is fine, and bikes home to his two swimming pools.
We remember “transitory,” Jay. We remember waiting. We remember exactly what it cost us — and we’re still paying for it at every gas station, every grocery store, and every time we open the electric bill.
Enjoy the bike ride home. The rest of us will be sitting in our cars watching the pump tick past sixty bucks and wondering how much longer we can afford your “patience.”
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