Federal Reserve press conference, 2021-09-22 — Chair Jerome Powell

Question (Steve Liesman, CNBC): I’m sorry, Chair Powell—I just want to follow up. You said I was right. When you said “right,” about that the Feds should not own—Federal Reserve officials should not own the same assets they’re buying? Is that—
Answer: I think that’s a reasonable thing. Yeah, and, of course, for the most part, we don’t. I mean, it was a real coincidence; I happened to pre-own these munis. They were bought many years ago, actually. And so we started buying munis as part of the Municipal Liquidity Facility. So it was really not a—it just was an unforeseen event. And I couldn’t sell them, so what I did was, I just held them, checked with the ethics people, and went ahead. So, but as a general principle, yeah, that makes a lot of sense.