By stubbornly refusing to lower interest rates despite ample data urging him to do so, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell is committing his third major policy blunder in six years.

If he continues this tight-money path through the July 29 Fed meeting, “Too Late” Powell will go down as the worst Fed chair in history.

It’s not like Powell lacks stiff competition. In the 1970s, to boost Richard Nixon’s re-election run, uber‑partisan Arthur Burns kept rates too low for too long, triggering a dizzying inflation spiral and a decade-long stagflation.

In the 1990s, Alan Greenspan severely underestimated productivity gains from the tech boom, over-estimated inflationary pressures, and needlessly hiked rates — six times between June 1999 and May 2000. This spiked the federal funds rate to 6.5 percent, triggering the dot-com market crash and 2001 recession.

A whiplashed Greenspan then slashed rates to rock-bottom levels and held them at 1 percent for a full year — from June 2003 to June 2004 — well beyond what the recovery warranted. This ultra-cheap money fueled reckless lending, a massive housing bubble, and ultimately detonated the 2007–2008 financial collapse.

Greenspan’s successor, Ben Bernanke, should have seen it coming. But the Princeton don failed to grasp rising systemic risk in mortgage markets. His paralysis turned what might have been a contained correction into a........

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