By Howard Schneider
WASHINGTON, May 22 (Reuters) – Kevin Warsh, whose broad criticism of current U.S. Federal Reserve officials, playbook for rate cuts and ties to President Donald Trump elevated him past other contenders to lead the central bank, was sworn in as Fed leader on Friday at a pivotal moment for monetary policy and the American economy.
An unfolding boom in AI technology is reshaping the economy in ways Fed officials say could be profound for workers, companies and consumers, but will be hard for Warsh and his colleagues to assess in real time.
At the same moment, inflation is high and potentially heading higher as the economy copes with shocks including oil driven over $100 a barrel by the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran, high import tariffs, and utility and other costs rising due to the AI rollout.
WALLER: DROP ‘EASING BIAS’
The debate over policy is already at a high pitch, with Fed Governor Christopher Waller, a Trump appointee who was interviewed for the job Warsh won, on Friday making a significant turn in his own thinking and agreeing with a group of recent Fed dissenters that the central bank should drop the “easing bias” from its policy outlook and open the door to a possible rate hike.
With recent data showing inflation broadening and intensifying across the economy, the Fed should “make it clear that a rate cut is no more likely in the future than a rate increase,” Waller said shortly before Warsh was sworn in. The comments add to market sentiment already leaning towards tighter monetary policy and a potential rate hike this year.
Warsh, 56, won Trump’s backing for the job over a year-long public audition among the top candidates.
In that span, the new chair has laid out ambitious reform goals for a central bank he argues had begun to lose its way by the time he quit his former seat as a governor in 2011 in opposition to Fed bond-buying. Now, though, his first months may be consumed with the more pressing dilemma of whether to raise interest rates to keep inflation from moving further beyond the Fed’s 2% target, or to put his credibility as an inflation fighter, the quality he will ultimately be judged by, at risk from the outset.
“Inflation is the Fed’s choice,” Warsh said at a Senate confirmation hearing, with its control over short-term interest rates a lever it can use to boost or discourage spending, and in doing so try to keep inflation at the Fed’s target. The Fed has missed its target for more than five years and is currently more than a percentage point above it.
HARD CHOICES
How to get inflation back down can involve hard choices that sometimes conflict with the policies and goals of the Trump administration, and sometimes with the Fed’s other aim of maximum employment. Warsh will be looking over his shoulder from the start of his term as the Fed’s 11th chair – at a global bond market that has begun bidding up interest rates in a sign of growing inflation concern, at colleagues like Waller who have begun setting expectations that higher rates may be needed, and at Trump, who in the past has viewed rate hikes as a political assault on his economic program and been sharply critical of outgoing Fed Chair Jerome Powell for not lowering borrowing costs.
Warsh’s comments and approach to ongoing disputes surrounding the Fed, including a coming Supreme Court decision on Trump’s so far unsuccessful effort to fire Governor Lisa Cook, will also be watched and compared closely to Powell’s staunch defense of Fed independence.
The Fed’s next meeting is on June 16-17, when policymakers vote on interest rates and a new policy statement, and also submit new economic projections.
One of Warsh’s first substantive decisions will be whether to submit a “dot” of where he thinks interest rates will be at the end of this year, and in doing so reveal whether his views are not so different from the colleagues he has slammed for “groupthink,” or become an outlier with views that could further confuse markets that are already driving up U.S. long-term interest rates.
The Fed’s monetary policy decisions influence an array of consumer-facing and politically sensitive interest rates like those on home mortgages, while its “choice” on inflation is now being made in the context of sticker shock over things like $4.50-per-gallon gasoline that are beyond its immediate reach.
Those have become visible reminders of Trump’s lack of progress on a key presidential promise that “starting on day one, we will end inflation and make America affordable again,” which is now in Warsh’s hands to deliver.
(Reporting by Howard Schneider;Editing by Dan Burns, Chizu Nomiyama, Rod Nickel)
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