Federal Reserve Bars Senior Staff From Trading Stocks and Bonds

The Federal Reserve is taking stock of its own employees. The monetary policy agency announced Thursday that it had banned senior members of its staff from buying and selling individual stocks and bonds. They will still be allowed to make generalized investments in financial vehicles like mutual funds, but “no purchases or sales will be allowed during periods of heightened financial market stress,” according to an agency statement. The move comes on the heels of the resignations of the Dallas and Boston Fed chairs over trades they made that appeared geared towards profiting off the Fed’s massive spending amid the coronavirus pandemic. Fed chair Jerome Powell said in a statement, “These tough new rules raise the bar high in order to assure the public we serve that all of our senior officials maintain a single-minded focus on the public mission of the Federal Reserve.”