WASHINGTON–As the CU Daily has reported, President Trump’s disdain for Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell is well-known. But who does the president have in mind as his replacement?
According to several reports, the president favors Kevin Warsh to succeed Powell, whose term is to expire in May of 2026 unless Trump acts first to remove him as Fed chair. Trump appointed Powell as Fed chair during his first term in office.
As the CU Daily also reported earlier, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Bloomberg last week that the administration will start interviewing candidates for Powell’s successor “sometime in the fall.”
About Warsh
Warsh, 55, was a vice president and executive director at Morgan Stanley in the company’s mergers and acquisitions division before serving as a special assistant to then-President George Bush for economic policy and as executive secretary at the National Economic Council.
Like Powell, Warsh does not have a graduate degree in economics. He graduated from Harvard Law School in 1995.
Bush appointed Warsh to the Fed’s Board of Governors in 2006, where he served during the height of the Great Recession as chief liaison to Wall Street.
“In that role, he helped coordinate the sale of Bear Sterns to JPMorgan Chase. But he also allowed Lehman Brothers to go under in 2008, a watershed moment for global financial markets, noted the New York Times. “Warsh resigned from the Fed in 2011 after publicly voicing his opposition to the central bank’s plan to buy $600 billion worth of bonds to inject more money into the economy.”
Transition Team Advisor
More recently, Warsh advised Trump’s transition team on economic policy after the November election. Earlier this year, in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Warsh criticized the Fed for letting inflation rise sharply during and after the pandemic.
Warsh currently serves as a distinguished economics fellow at the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank; and is a visiting scholar at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business.
Additionally, he is a member of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office’s panel of advisers. He is married to billionaire Jane Lauder, granddaughter of Estée Lauder, the late cosmetics industry mogul.
In an interview with Fox Business, ahead of the Fed’s latest policy meeting last month, Warsh said the turmoil sparked by Trump’s tariff war indicates an economy that “is transitioning.”
‘Inflation is a Choice’
When asked about the likelihood of Trump’s tariffs stoking inflation, Warsh said that “inflation is a choice, and the Fed has made a lot of bad choices over these last several years.”
