Task Force

The new Fed chair just promised to change everything. Read what he actually has the power to change.

There is a new chairman at the Federal Reserve, and on Wednesday he held his first press conference. The rate did not move. It stayed pinned in its range of 3.5% to 3.75%, right where it has sat since last year, and the committee voted to keep it there 12 to 0.

So nothing happened. End of story.

Except that is not the story Kevin Warsh came to tell. He did not walk to that podium to announce a pause. He walked up there to announce a renovation. A policy statement cut to 130 words from 341. Forward guidance, gone. His own dot, withheld from the dot plot. And the part he clearly wanted in the headlines: five brand-new task forces to take a fresh look at how the Fed does its job. One on communications, one on the balance sheet, one on data, one on productivity and jobs in the age of AI, and one on the inflation framework itself.

That is a lot of motion for a day on which the only number that touches your mortgage stayed exactly the same.

Now, the charitable read deserves a fair hearing, because plenty of serious people are giving it one. The Fed has been wrong about inflation for years, the argument goes, so a new chair tearing up the old playbook and bringing in fresh thinking is exactly what the institution needs. Warsh himself has called for “regime change.” Hard to argue a place that missed this badly shouldn’t review how it operates.

Fine. So review it. But here is the question nobody in that room thought to ask, and it is the one that matters: review it against what, exactly? What is it the Fed has supposedly been doing all this time, that five committees are now going to do better?