Kevin Warsh gets to choose the next president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. This is being described as an opportunity to reshape the central bank. Reshaping the central bank is what people say when they mean hiring someone who agrees with you about whether to make money cost 4.5% or 4.75%.
The Atlanta Fed president votes on monetary policy one out of every three years. The rest of the time they give speeches at chamber of commerce luncheons in Birmingham. They publish research papers about regional economic conditions that get cited by exactly nobody. They manage a staff of economists who build models predicting things that already happened.
Warsh became Fed Chairman in 2025. He's 55 years old. He married a woman whose last name is Estée Lauder. He worked at Morgan Stanley. He joined the Fed Board of Governors at age 35 because he was friends with the right people. This is the meritocracy your day trading cousin thinks he can beat with a YouTube tutorial and $400.
The selection process involves interviewing candidates about their views on inflation targeting and labor market slack. It involves reviewing their published academic work. It involves checking whether they'll embarrass everyone at Jackson Hole. What it does not involve is asking whether any of this matters to someone buying 0DTE SPY calls at 3:58 PM on a Friday.
Whoever gets this job will show up. They'll read prepared remarks about dual mandates. They'll say the word "data-dependent" forty times per quarter. They'll retire with full benefits and write a memoir nobody reads. The Atlanta Fed will continue doing exactly what it did before. The S&P will go up or down for reasons that have nothing to do with any of it.
Warsh is reshaping the central bank the way rearranging deck chairs reshapes the f*cking Titanic.
Photo by Lance Asper on Unsplash
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