Warsh Fed names outside co-leads for five monetary-policy task forces

On 9 July 2026 the Federal Reserve announced the leadership and objectives of five task forces “to advance the conduct of monetary policy,” each co-led by external advisers and supported by Federal Reserve staff, with a mandate the Board described as operating “independently, with a mandate to follow the evidence, provide candid feedback, and produce rigorous findings for the Federal Open Market Committee.”¹ Warsh had announced the task-force initiative at his first post-meeting press conference on 17 June 2026; the 9 July release names the co-leads and objectives.² Chairman Kevin Warsh said: “The Federal Reserve’s commitment to price stability and maximum employment is unwavering. As is our resolve to pursue our mandate with rigor.” He continued: “The U.S. economy has changed significantly over the last generation, and never more so than right now. Each task force will carefully consider whether policymakers’ means and methods, analytical tools and policy approaches can be improved upon.”¹ The five task forces, their objectives per the release, and their co-leads: Communications (“[r]eview how the Federal Reserve conveys policy deliberations and decisions amid uncertainty”) — Peter R. Fisher (identified in the release as professor of practice at the Foster School of Business, University of Washington); Arminio Fraga, former president of the Central Bank of Brazil; and Mervyn King, former governor of the Bank of England. Balance Sheet Policy (“[e]xamine the costs, benefits, and institutional implications of the Federal Reserve’s current balance sheet regime”) — Karen Dynan, professor of economics at Harvard; Raghuram Rajan, former governor of the Reserve Bank of India; and Jeremy Stein, former Federal Reserve governor. Data (“[i]mprove the quality and timeliness of real economic signals that inform the Federal Reserve’s policy judgments”) — Raj Chetty, professor of economics at Harvard; Doug McMillon, former president and CEO of Walmart Inc.; and Kevin Murphy, professor of economics at the University of Chicago. Productivity and Jobs (“[a]ssess the economic impact of new general-purpose technologies, including artificial intelligence, to inform the Federal Reserve’s policy judgments”) — Marc Andreessen, cofounder and general partner of Andreessen Horowitz; Charles I. Jones, professor of economics at Stanford, currently on leave at Anthropic; and Asha Sharma, executive vice president and Xbox CEO at Microsoft Corp. Inflation Frameworks (“[r]evisit how the Federal Reserve understands and responds to the drivers of inflation”) — Greg Mankiw, former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers; Thomas Sargent, Nobel laureate; and William White, former economic adviser at the Bank for International Settlements.¹

1. The review sits outside the five-year framework-review cycle whose second round concluded in August 2025: the Statement on Longer-Run Goals and Monetary Policy Strategy — adopted in January 2012, revised in August 2020 and again on 22 August 2025 at the close of the Committee’s second framework review, and reaffirmed annually — is the document an Inflation Frameworks task force would inform, while the Communications review covers “how the Federal Reserve conveys policy deliberations and decisions amid uncertainty,” a channel already changed in practice by the June meeting’s abbreviated policy statement (see FOMC June meeting: Warsh’s first as Chair).¹³⁴

2. The externally co-led structure places former foreign central-bank governors (King, Fraga, Rajan), a former Fed governor (Stein), academic economists (Chetty, Dynan, Murphy, Jones, Mankiw, Sargent) and technology and retail executives (Andreessen, McMillon, Sharma) inside a review of the institution’s “means and methods” — a break from the internally run framework reviews of 2019-2020 and 2024-2025, which proceeded through Fed Listens events, a research conference and staff analysis without external co-leads; the balance-sheet task force’s mandate to examine “the costs, benefits, and institutional implications of the Federal Reserve’s current balance sheet regime” reaches the ample-reserves operating framework the Committee reaffirmed in its June statement.¹⁴