The federal government has in general not acted with the alacrity that the fast-spreading coronavirus demands. But Powell has — and he’s done so with moral clarity, talking about how “people are undertaking sacrifices for the common good. We need to make them whole.”

Powell was early to grok the magnitude of the crisis, rapidly running through every tool that Ben Bernanke used in 2009 and then coming up with more of his own.

The ability to move aggressively when facing a real crisis — while not overreacting to a mere stock-market tumble — is arguably the most important quality in any Fed chair.

Bernanke was by all accounts an excellent crisis-era Fed chair, but even he moved extremely slowly by Powell standards.