President Joe Biden soon faces the same decision his most recent Democratic predecessors did: whether to reappoint a Federal Reserve chair put in that job by a Republican.

He hasn’t revealed his thinking, and aides say he has not begun the formal process of determining whether to seek a second term for Jerome Powell in the government’s most important economic policy job. But there’s reason to suspect he may follow the pattern set by Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama when they renominated Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke, respectively.

The case begins with Powell’s commitment to using expansive monetary policies to support economic activity since the