President Donald Trump says he’ll tap former Federal Reserve governor Kevin Warsh as the next Fed chair to replace Jerome Powell in May—with Trump believing that he can finally get the booming economy that he promised to voters.
When Trump said that Warsh comes from “central casting,” the president revealed a lot about his own views of the 55-year-old’s looks and conventional pedigree. Warsh has many of the trappings of a traditional pick to lead the world’s most important central bank, yet he’s doing so at a decidedly unconventional moment for the Fed as Trump has said the new chair needs to cut its benchmark rates to the White House’s liking.
“He’s very smart, very good, strong, young, pretty young,” Trump told reporters on Friday about Warsh. “He was the central casting guy that people wanted.”
The president added, “Looks don’t mean anything, but he’s got the look.”
Rate cuts of the degree sought by Trump could temporarily boost growth, but they also pose the risk of overheating the economy at a time when inflation is already elevated and affordability is a top concern for much of the American public.
Warsh was previously a runner-up for the Senate-confirmed post of Fed Chair in 2017, when Trump selected Powell to lead the central bank. Trump has since said that he was given bad advice regarding Powell.
Warsh is credentialed with degrees from Stanford University and Harvard University Law School. He is also married to Jane Lauder, the daughter of billionaire cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder, a major Republican donor.
At 35, Warsh became the youngest governor on the Fed’s seven-member board, serving in that post from 2006 to 2011. He was previously an economic aide in George W. Bush’s Republican administration and was an investment banker at Morgan Stanley.
Warsh worked closely with then-Chair Ben Bernanke in 2008-09 during the central bank’s efforts to combat the financial crisis and the Great Recession. Bernanke later wrote in his memoirs that Warsh was “one of my closest advisers and confidants” and added that his “political and markets savvy and many contacts on Wall Street would prove invaluable.”
Still, Warsh appeared in key moments to be misguided about the depth of the challenges confronting the U.S. economy as mortgage defaults and layoffs mounted in the Great Recession. He wanted the Fed to keep its benchmark rates higher when the economy was at risk of deflation and possibly collapsing.
Warsh raised concerns in 2008 that further interest rate cuts by the Fed could spur inflation. Yet even after the Fed cut its rate to nearly zero, inflation stayed low.
And he objected in meetings in 2011 to the Fed’s decision to purchase $600 billion of Treasury bonds, an effort to lower long-term interest rates, though he ultimately voted in favor of the decision at Bernanke’s behest.
Warsh also behaved at times like a pre-Trump Republican, calling in a 2010 speech for ending “the creep of trade protectionism” that he declared to be the opposite of “pro-growth policies.” Trump has since largely overhauled GOP dogma by pushing for massive hikes in import taxes, having unilaterally imposed them last year by declaring an economic emergency.
Warsh has been working as a visiting economics fellow at the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank located at Stanford University. He is also a lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a partner at the Duquesne Family Office, which manages the wealth of billionaire investor Stanley Druckenmiller.
In recent months, Warsh has appeared to engage in an active campaign for the Fed post with TV interviews and articles. He has become much more critical of the Fed, calling for “regime change” and assailing Powell for engaging on issues like climate change and diversity, equity, and inclusion, which Warsh said are outside the Fed’s mandate.
In a July interview on CNBC, Warsh said Fed policy “has been broken for quite a long time.”
“The central bank that sits there today is radically different than the central bank I joined in 2006,” he added. By allowing inflation to surge in 2021-22, the Fed “brought about the greatest mistake in macroeconomic policy in 45 years, that divided the country.”
In a November opinion article in The Wall Street Journal, Warsh said that the Fed “should abandon the dogma that inflation is caused when the economy grows too much and workers get paid too much. Inflation is caused when government spends too much and prints too much.”
He suggested that inflationary pressures would be lowered because technologies such as artificial intelligence would lead to higher levels of productivity. His bet that AI will lead to growth without inflation aligns closely with Trump’s own belief that inflation has been defeated and that the AI buildout will power growth this year.
“AI will be a significant disinflationary force, increasing productivity and bolstering American competitiveness,” Warsh wrote.
—By Josh Boak and Christopher Rugaber, Associated Press