

What will Kevin Warsh’s Federal Reserve look like?
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. KEVIN GOT the nod, in the end. On January 30th President Donald Trump picked Kevin Warsh to lead the Federal Reserve.
He bested a rival Kevin, Hassett (an earlier frontrunner), Rick Rieder and Christopher Waller in the final leg of a months-long contest. Mr Trump lauded Mr Warsh’s lengthy CV. “On top of everything else", wrote America’s reality-TV-star president, “he is ‘central casting’." His Wall Street looks aside, Mr Warsh seems a peculiar choice for a president on a crusade to lower interest rates.
He made his name as a ferocious inflation hawk during his stint as Fed governor from 2006 to 2011. Bafflingly, he spent even the pits of the global financial crisis of 2007-09, when inflation was non-existent, fretting that prices might surge. Now America really does have an inflation problem.
It took a pandemic and colossal fiscal giveaways (which, to his credit, Mr Warsh opposed), but prices finally did get out of hand. The Mr Warsh of two decades ago might have felt a touch of smug vindication. Instead, Mr Warsh now claims to be a rate-cutting dove of just the sort Mr Trump admires.
Mr Warsh explains this change of heart by pointing to the deregulatory genius of the president’s policymaking and the prospect of a productivity-enhancing boom in artificial intelligence. These forces, he argues, will wipe away whatever inflation lingers in the economy. The Fed need not fret and can happily lower rates to juice things.
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