The economics and policy podcast for professional women who want the read, not the recap. Kevin Warsh ran his first FOMC meeting as Fed chair, the committee left rates unchanged, and the headline wrote itself: a quieter Fed. The tradeoff is a chair who refuses to admit there's a tradeoff at all.
In this episode:
Warsh called five years of inflation a choice. Not circumstance, not the pandemic, not supply chains. A choice, which lays the blame at the feet of the last Fed and makes the problem his to fix.
He said \"price stability\" until someone should have counted, and the real audience wasn't the press. It was an audience of one. We break down the permission framework he built so he can refuse a rate cut without a public fight.
He dropped forward guidance, shrank the Fed statement from a page to four paragraphs, kept the dot plot but left off his own dot, and called the dots \"in pencil.\" For 15 years the Fed held your hand and told you its next move. That just ended, and it changes the runway on every big money decision you make.
And he said the part most chairs won't: he doesn't believe full employment and price stability are a tradeoff. He thinks the Fed can have both.
What you'll walk out knowing: why \"inflation is a choice\" is the most important sentence of the meeting, how a quieter Fed shifts risk onto you, and the three things to watch over the next six weeks, the minutes, the next meeting, and the Fed speak that tells you how unanimous \"unanimous\" really was.
This is The Tradeoff. About 10 minutes. The context you'd get if you were in the room.
","author_name":"Mattie Duppler"}