Richard Clarida, the outgoing vice-chair of the Federal Reserve, has blamed “inadvertent errors” for failing to disclose the full extent of his trading activity at the start of the pandemic, threatening to reignite an ethics scandal at the US central bank.

New disclosures reveal that Clarida — already under fire for making trades as the Fed was plotting emergency support for the economy — was more active in financial markets than he originally divulged.

Clarida, the Fed’s second-in-command, had previously disclosed that he moved between $1m and $5m from a bond fund into a stock fund on February 27, 2020. Those trades were controversial because they were made just a day before Jay Powell, chair of the central bank, signalled the Fed was preparing emergency measures to support the economy.