July 10 (Reuters) – Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh on Thursday announced those he has tapped to lead a sweeping review of how the U.S. central bank conducts its policy operations.
Here’s a short take on each of the 13 men and two women set to steer the five taskforces Warsh has set up.
COMMUNICATIONS
* Peter Fisher, professor of practice, Foster School of Business, University of Washington
Fisher served as under secretary of the U.S. Treasury for domestic finance in the first two years of former President George W. Bush’s administration, prior to which he was the System Open Market Account manager at the New York Fed.
* Arminio Fraga, founder and chairman, Gávea Investimentos; former president, Central Bank of Brazil
Fraga, who worked in the 1990s at global financier George Soros’ investment firm in New York, ran Brazil’s central bank from March 1999 to December 2002, right on the heels of the Latin American country’s era of hyper-inflation. Since then he has run his own investment firm, Gavea Investments, and he is on the advisory council to the Bretton Woods Committee, which promotes international economic cooperation and the work of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank Group.
* Mervyn King, former governor, Bank of England
King was head of the BoE for a decade, from 2003 to 2013, a period covering the global financial crisis. He is among the cadre of global central bankers who led the charge to adopting inflation targeting and more open communications.
BALANCE SHEET POLICY
* Karen Dynan, professor of economics, Harvard University
Dynan was the chief economist at the U.S. Treasury Department from 2014 to 2017 during former President Barack Obama’s second term. Earlier in her career she was a staff economist at the Fed for 17 years, leading its household and real estate finance section from 2000 to 2007.
* Raghuram Rajan, professor of finance, University of Chicago Booth School of Business; former governor, Reserve Bank of India
Rajan ran the RBI from 2013 to 2016 and a decade earlier was chief economist at the IMF. In 2022, he joined three other economists in authoring a paper for the Kansas City Fed’s annual Jackson Hole symposium focused on the challenges of reducing the Fed’s large balance sheet titled: “Liquidity Dependence: Why Shrinking Central Bank Balance Sheets is an Uphill Task.”
* Jeremy Stein, professor of economics, Harvard University; former governor, Federal Reserve Board
Stein served two years as a Fed governor from May 2012 to May 2014. Last year, he and two other academics authored a Brookings Institution paper – “Treasury Market Dysfunction and the Role of the Central Bank” – examining changes in the market for U.S. Treasury securities since the Fed’s massive bond buying during the COVID-19 pandemic.
DATA
* Raj Chetty, professor of economics, Harvard University
Chetty directs the Opportunity Insights team at Harvard best known for groundbreaking research on the slowing ability of the poor to move into the middle class. Harvard touts him as one of the youngest tenured professors in the Ivy League university’s history whose team uses “big data” to understand how to give underprivileged children a better chance to succeed.
* Doug McMillon, former president and CEO, Walmart
McMillon in January wrapped up a dozen years as head of the retailing powerhouse, where he is credited with reshaping it from old-school big-box retailer into a tech-centric company positioned to compete in the e-commerce world with the likes of Amazon.
* Kevin Murphy, professor of economics, University of Chicago
Much of Murphy’s research has focused on inequality, unemployment and relative wages; addiction; and the economic value of improvements in health and longevity, according to his UC homepage.
PRODUCTIVITY AND JOBS
* Marc Andreessen, cofounder and general partner, Andreessen Horowitz
Andreessen was an early developer of the Internet and is one of Silicon Valley’s best known venture capitalists. He is a prominent supporter and major donor to President Donald Trump, and advised the administration’s cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
* Charles “Chad” Jones, professor of economics, Stanford University, on leave at Anthropic Institute
Jones earned a PhD in economics from MIT in 1993 and from there joined Stanford University’s economics faculty, studying the drivers of economic growth. In a recent paper he sketched a future in which artificial intelligence may fundamentally change the economy by boosting productivity and creating a world of “abundance,” over a period of decades, but that it would also be “prudent to spend the intervening time making preparations for the potentially large consequences for labor markets, inequality, and catastrophic risk.”
* Asha Sharma, executive vice president and XBOX CEO, Microsoft
Sharma joined Microsoft after graduating in 2011 from the University of Minnesota, before stints at other tech companies including Facebook and Instacart, for which she was chief operating officer during its IPO in 2023. She rejoined Microsoft in 2024 to run its internal AI development and since February of this year has overseen its gaming division, which this week announced it was cutting 3,200 jobs in a restructuring. The company said that the jobs are not being replaced by AI, but analysts drew a connection between the need for cost-cutting and Big Tech’s massive AI investments.
INFLATION FRAMEWORKS
* Greg Mankiw, professor of economics, Harvard University; former chairman of George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers
In 2024 Mankiw laid out views on inflation that overlap with those of Warsh, including skepticism over paying too much attention to the unemployment rate to gauge inflation pressures, and the idea that a 2%-inflation-targetting central bank should be ready to declare victory when inflation rounds to 2%, rather than hits it exactly. In 2002 he co-authored a paper for the European Central Bank that suggested an inflation-targeting central bank should use a price index that gives weight to the nominal wage level; the ECB did not adopt such a metric.
* Thomas Sargent, professor of economics, New York University; 2011 Nobel laureate in economics
Sargent has published a broad range of research on the causes of inflation, and has argued that, when governments are running deficits, raising interest rates to fight inflation today could actually lead to higher inflation in the future. In a recent paper he attributed the Fed’s late response in 2022 to rising inflation not just to the idea that inflation would not persist but also to uncertainty over how tight labor markets really were and a perception that raising interest rates would do too much harm.
* William White, senior fellow, C.D. Howe Institute; former economic adviser, Bank for International Settlements
White received his PhD in economics from the UK’s University of Manchester in 1969 and had stints on staff at the Bank of England and then the Bank of Canada before joining the Bank for International Settlements in 1996, where he oversaw research and data production and helped organize global central banker meetings. While at the BIS he published a critique of inflation-targeting.
(Reporting By Dan Burns and Ann Saphir; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama )
Comments