Danielle DiMartino Booth 'Cautiously Hopeful' on Warsh as Fed Chair

Danielle DiMartino Booth, CEO and Chief Strategist at QI Research reacts to President Trump's Fed Chair choice.

President Donald Trump has badgered Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell ceaselessly — and unsuccessfully — for aggressive interest rate cuts despite the fact that US inflation is still overshooting the central bank’s target.

With Powell soon to step aside, Trump has picked Kevin Warsh to replace him. Warsh is a loyalist who’s declared his alignment with Trump’s views on monetary policy. That doesn’t mean the Fed is about to fall in line with the president’s economic agenda.

Warsh, 55, is a veteran of both Wall Street and public service whom Trump nearly picked as Fed chair in 2017 before selecting Powell instead, a choice the president has said he regrets.

After graduating from Harvard Law School, Warsh worked at Morgan Stanley for seven years before joining George W. Bush’s White House as an economic adviser in 2002. Four years later, under Bush, he became, at age 35, the youngest person named to the Fed’s Board of Governors. During the 2008 financial crisis, he used his Wall Street connections to help broker the sale of failing banks.

Warsh resigned from the Fed in 2011 because he opposed an unconventional measure it was undertaking — a second round of asset purchases — in an attempt to bolster a weak economic recovery.

Since then, he’s served as an adviser to the Duquesne Family Office and on various corporate boards, and has been a fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution think tank and a lecturer at Stanford Business School. Warsh has also advised Trump on economic matters for years.

Warsh is married to Jane Lauder, the daughter of prominent Republican donor Ronald Lauder, who was a classmate of Trump’s at the Wharton School. Lauder donated $5 million in March to MAGA Inc., Trump’s super political action committee.

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