Trump Might Not Like What He Hears From New Fed Chair

Kevin Warsh is stepping into the spotlight this week, and the situation he's inheriting at the Federal Reserve is anything but simple. As he oversees his first policy meeting as Fed chair, inflation is running hotter than expected, rate cuts penciled in back in March suddenly look shaky, and a vocal hawkish bloc on the committee is pressing to keep tightening on the table. Markets widely expect no move on interest rates—a move that could annoy President Trump—but the real drama lies in what Warsh says, and how he says it, in his debut press conference, Axios reports.

Warsh's own record adds to the suspense. He's long positioned himself as a tough inflation fighter, yet has argued that AI and Trump-era supply-side policies could support faster, non-inflationary growth—an intellectual foundation for the rate cuts the White House favors. He has also criticized the Fed's "dot plot" of rate projections and the broader habit of detailed forward guidance, signaling he may reshape that approach moving forward, per Reuters. It's possible the Fed will now drop language hinting that the next step is a rate cut, with or without explicitly flagging a coming hike that an increasing number of economists say is needed, per the Hill.