How Warsh's Task Forces Will Reshape The Federal Reserve

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: At his first press conference as Fed Chair, Kevin Warsh gave us his sort of big idea for how he [00:00:05] Speaker 2: changes the Fed. I'm appointing a task force in each of five areas. We're going to seek out the best minds, both the best thinking inside of the Federal Reserve and the best people I know in business and economics and the academy and technology and the rest to share their views. [00:00:25] Speaker 1: These task forces are going to look at a number of different things that Kevin Warsh thinks are really important and they're going to come up with some recommendations for how it should change. One of Kevin Warsh's most clearly held and often articulated views is that artificial intelligence is a reason for the Fed to cut interest rates in the long run. Much like the widespread use of the computer in the 1990s, he thinks that the advancements in artificial intelligence are going to help businesses and consumers be a little bit more efficient, be a little bit more productive. Kevin Warsh didn't come to this view about artificial intelligence by accident. He is an artificial intelligence evangelist because he spends a lot of time with people who are working in the field, people like Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Alex Karp. But it's going to be a kind of challenging argument, I think, to make to the rest of the members of the Fed who are, you know, not sitting out [00:01:17] Speaker 3: there blind, ignoring everything that's going on. I'm bullish on the long-term prospects of AI, but what are the short-term implications for monetary policy or even the long-term implications? I think it's [00:01:27] Speaker 1: still too soon to know. Kevin Warsh has said he thinks that the Fed's data is really out of step with the [00:01:35] Speaker 2: way the modern economy works. Most of the data that central bankers and other government officials in the United States consume come with old-fashioned survey methods, survey methods that don't have response rates that we need, asking questions that might have been quite applicable a generation ago [00:01:54] Speaker 1: that are less applicable now. He talks about things like the jobs report. That number often gets revised up or down, often quite substantially by tens or hundreds of thousands of jobs over the months. Kevin Warsh argues that there is much better data that the Fed could be using out there in the economy. [00:02:11] Speaker 2: Fed's statement says that inflation is primarily determined by monetary policy. You bet it is. I've said for years inflation is a choice. What he's saying there is that the Fed [00:02:23] Speaker 1: needs to prove to the economy and the financial markets that it is going to go out there and knock down rising prices wherever he sees them. The devil is in the details here. He doesn't really like this thing called PCE, which is a specific index that the Fed has used to measure inflation. [00:02:40] Speaker 2: We used to use core PCE, core measures, so we'd exclude food and energy because it was sort of a rough swag as to what was going on. We don't have to do a rough swag anymore. What I'm most interested in [00:02:52] Speaker 1: is what's the underlying inflation rate. Inflation, he says, is not just the price of eggs going up. It's what happens when everybody else in the economy, all the other businesses and consumers start reacting by thinking, oh, lots of prices are going to go up in the economy. That is a little bit more of a complicated argument. So Warsh has set up this task force that's going to look at the actual definition of inflation. The communications task force is probably going to be the most visible one. They will almost certainly change something called the dot plot, where Fed officials tell the world [00:03:30] Speaker 2: where they think interest rates should go. I, however, have refrained from offering any projections of my own, consistent with my long-held views on the SEP, at least as currently structured. [00:03:41] Speaker 1: The reason he did that was that he doesn't think the Fed should be in the business of telling people where interest rates should go when it's not in a big crisis. So since the financial crisis, the Fed has grown what is called its balance sheet. It has purchased trillions of dollars in financial assets. And it did that because it couldn't lower interest rates anymore. They were already essentially at zero. And it had to figure out a way to try to keep [00:04:11] Speaker 2: stimulating the economy. I believe we need a smaller central bank balance sheet. The balance sheet tool disproportionately helps those with financial assets. People worry that when the Fed [00:04:21] Speaker 1: starts getting rid of all of these things on its balance sheet, particularly mortgages, it might cause the yields on those debt to rise. That's the worry when people talk about the Fed reducing its balance sheet that it could have some effect on interest rates that regular consumers pay on mortgages, for instance. And of course, it's a big concern of the Trump administration and a lot of Americans to get mortgage rates down. We want to stop inflation, but we don't want to stop greatness. So the way that Kevin Walsh goes about making these changes are going to be pretty important. What he has to do is convince all of these other people who vote with him on the Fed's rate setting committee to change their minds too. And so he's doing that through this series of task forces.