Kevin Warsh was sworn in as the 17th head of the Fed on Friday, marking the first chairman to take the oath of office at the White House since Alan Greenspan in 1987, and his choice of venue says a lot about how close the central bank now is to executive power. From there, the optics got weirder. The president used the ceremony to insist that he wanted Warsh to act independently and completely ignore him – which is unusual coming from a man who spent two years publicly urging the previous chair to step up faster, reportedly joked that he would sue his successor if rates stayed high, and chose Warsh primarily because he wanted the chair to be more comfortable.
A up-to-date chair with elderly instincts
If we take the independence pledge at face value, it will be a remarkable twist. Treat it like theater and nothing will change. Either way, the market is betting on calmer relations between the White House and the Fed, based on evidence from two years ago.
None of this softens the man himself. Warsh inherits a divided committee; the latest meeting brought the most opposition since 1992, and he has repeatedly said he wants to shrink the central bank’s bloated balance sheet. For a market based on effortless money, the idea of ​​withdrawing trillions of dollars of bonds from the system is not an obvious incentive to buy the highs.
Reform is a double-edged word
In his first remarks, Warsh promised a reform-oriented Fed that defies what he called stationary frameworks and models. Get rid of the ceremonial language that directly points to how the Fed communicates in what is most likely an attempt to end forward-looking guidance, a practice of announcing the path of interest rates in advance that investors have relied on for more than a decade. Reform sounds good. In practice, the Fed deliberately telling markets less is removing the safety net on which record valuations quietly depend. In a market conditioned to hand-holding, less hand-holding is not the bullish development that the word “reform” suggests.
Fed FAQs
Monetary policy in the US is shaped by the Federal Reserve (Fed). The Fed has two missions: achieving price stability and promoting full employment. The basic tool for achieving these goals is adjusting interest rates. When prices rise too rapid and inflation exceeds the Fed’s 2% target, it raises interest rates, increasing borrowing costs throughout the economy. This results in a stronger US dollar (USD) because it makes the United States a more attractive place for international investors to park their money. When inflation falls below 2% or the unemployment rate becomes too high, the Fed may lower interest rates to encourage borrowing, which will negatively impact the dollar.
The Federal Reserve (Fed) holds eight policy meetings a year, during which the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) assesses economic conditions and makes monetary policy decisions. Twelve Fed officials attend the FOMC meeting – seven members of the Board of Governors, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and four of the remaining eleven regional reserve bank presidents, who serve one-year terms on a rotating basis.
In extreme situations, the Federal Reserve may employ a policy called quantitative easing (QE). QE is the process by which the Fed significantly increases the flow of credit in the gridlocked financial system. This is an unusual policy measure used during crises or when inflation is extremely low. This was the Fed’s weapon of choice during the Great Financial Crisis in 2008. It involves the Fed printing more dollars and using them to buy high-quality bonds from financial institutions. QE tends to weaken the US dollar.
Quantitative Tightening (QT) is the reverse process of QE, in which the Federal Reserve stops purchasing bonds from financial institutions and does not reinvest capital from the bonds it holds at maturity to purchase up-to-date bonds. This is usually positive for the value of the US dollar.
