Jerome Powell

President Joe Biden met separately with Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell and Fed Governor Lael Brainard at the White House on Thursday as he considers who will lead the central bank next year.

President Joe Biden said he’ll announce soon his choice of nominees for chair and other vacancies on the Federal Reserve, amid a scandal over stock trades by central bank officials.

Jerome Powell is widely expected to be renominated to a second term as Federal Reserve chair, but his chances have been modestly dented by the revelations of stock trading by some senior Fed officials in 2020, according to economists surveyed by Bloomberg News.

The Federal Reserve will ban top officials from buying individual stocks and bonds as well as limit active trading after an embarrassing scandal that led two officials to resign and clouded Chair Jerome Powell’s path to renomination.

What once seemed like an easy potential renomination for Powell has morphed into a problem for the White House as Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, and progressive groups call into question the trading activity.

Municipals continue to stay in their own lane. ICI reported $1.4 billion of inflows in the 28th consecutive week.

Refinitiv Lipper reported just over $1 billion of inflows into municipal bond mutual funds, an $800 million drop from a week prior, moving the four week moving average to $1.6 billion.

Bond investors may not wait long to start pushing back against Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell’s efforts to delink the start of asset-purchase tapering from the countdown to eventual policy-rate hikes.

The members of Congress, in asking that Biden find some other, unspecified, nominee, are going against the preference of Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who has told Biden advisers that she wants to see Powell renominated.

Returns of negative 0.40% would be the third-worst August performance of the past 10 years, according to Bloomberg data.