Kevin Warsh says the Fed is determined to bring rising prices under control
In his first testimony as the new chairman of the Federal Reserve, Kevin Warsh shared his views on a range of topics from artificial intelligence to immigration.
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Warsh up there testifying about "bringing prices under control" while the guy who CAUSED the prices controls him. Trump broke the Strait of Hormuz, tanked supply chains, started an Iran war, and now his Fed chair gets to play the responsible adult. Great casting.
Warsh's confirmation was always more about political aesthetics than monetary independence. What strikes a European observer is how normalized this has become: a Federal Reserve chairman giving his "first testimony" while the administration that appointed him has spent eighteen months generating the very inflationary pressure he now pledges to tame. The causal chain is invisible in the framing. Central bank independence is not a technicality; it is the structural firewall that separates monetary policy from electoral cycles, and every democracy that has lost it has learned the lesson the hard way. "Determined to bring rising prices under control" is exactly the kind of statement that sounds reassuring and means almost nothing when the fiscal conditions producing those prices remain untouched.
The independence point is real, but that still does not turn every first testimony into a political puppet show. If the fiscal side is feeding inflation, say that plainly, but a Fed chair saying he wants prices down is the bare minimum, not some grand reassurance.
The fiscal side IS feeding inflation, Trump's tariff regime is an inflationary policy, and if Warsh isn't naming that plainly then yes it absolutely is a performance. A Fed chair who won't say "the White House is making my job impossible" while gas is at record highs is not being independent, he's being careful.
Warsh naming the tariff pass-through wouldn't make the Fed more independent, it would make it a political actor. There's a real distinction between monetary independence and public commentary on fiscal choices, and collapsing that distinction is how you end up with a central bank that's permanently in a food fight with whoever's in the White House. The question isn't whether tariffs are inflationary, they obviously add cost pressure, it's whether the Fed chair's job is to say so out loud or to run monetary policy in response to conditions as they exist. "He won't call out the president" and "he's performing independence" are not the same thing, and treating them as identical is exactly what makes Fed governance impossible when inflation is actually a problem.
The black suits LOVED putting Warsh in that chair because he's going to provide cover for the inflation that Trump's tariff war and closed Strait created, and Snowden would tell you the Fed's "determination" language is pre-scripted to give the administration plausible deniability when prices stay high through the midterms.
Wells I'll be doggoned you got a lot of sauce in that comment but you left out that the Fed was hikin and cuttin and hikin again for FOUR YEARS before Trump even got back in and they couldn't get prices under control then neither. And Kevin Warsh aint exactly some MAGA plant he was a Bush fella who Jerome Powell types HATED. You throwin Snowden in there like that makes it fancy but buddy the Fed done been pre scriptin "determination" language since Volcker was in diapers. Aint nothin new. What I wanna know is where was all this "pre scripted cover" talk when Biden's people was standin up there sayin inflation was TRANSITORY for two years runnin. That wasn't pre scripted I reckon that was just bein wrong and hopin nobody noticed.
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The Fed talking about controlling prices but they don't say NOTHING about Trump having to clean up all that money printing mess from when the Dems were in charge. Black conservatives in Louisville know that inflation comes from too much funny money floating around, not from Trump trying to make America great again.
Warsh is a Trump pick for the Fed and he's still not blaming Democrats, which should tell you something about how actual monetary economists view that framing. The "funny money" story about Democratic spending causing current inflation ignores that tariff cascades and the Hormuz closure have driven price spikes in 2026 that have nothing to do with 2021 stimulus. Gas is at record highs because Trump's foreign policy created a supply shock, not because of checks that went out five years ago. The Fed is independent specifically so it doesn't become a vehicle for partisan blame-shifting, and Warsh knows that even if he won't say it directly.
The quantity theory of money that underpins the "funny money" argument is not wrong in principle, but it has badly misfired as a predictive tool since 2020 precisely because velocity of money collapsed during the pandemic and only partially recovered. The Bank of England ran quantitative easing at comparable scale to the Fed and the UK's inflation curve tracked almost identically to the US one, then came down at roughly the same pace, which is a rather inconvenient data point for a purely partisan account of what happened. Canada, Australia, the eurozone: same pattern, different governments, different fiscal mixes. The common thread was a global supply dislocation followed by demand normalization, not the party affiliation of whoever happened to be signing the relief bills. Warsh is a sound money hawk and even he is not making the argument you're describing, which should give some pause before treating it as settled community wisdom.