Kevin Warsh

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Kevin Warsh, a former Fed governor, became chair of the Federal Reserve in 2026.

© Brendan McDermid/Reuters

Kevin Warsh is chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (the Fed), the central bank of the United States. A former Fed governor and former economic policy adviser to President George W. Bush, Warsh succeeded Jerome Powell as Fed chair in May 2026.

Kevin Warsh was born on April 13, 1970, in Albany, New York, and grew up in the nearby suburb of Loudonville, the youngest of Robert Warsh and Judith Philipson Warsh’s three children. His father ran several companies, and his mother worked as a journalist and freelance writer. He attended Shaker High School, where he played tennis, competing in the state championships.

He graduated from Stanford University in 1992 with a bachelor’s degree in public policy and received a law degree from Harvard Law School in 1995. His law school focus included economics and regulatory policy. He also studied market economics and economic policy at Harvard Business School and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Despite that august résumé, Warsh has said that much of what he understands about the way the economy works comes from his upstate New York roots, telling the State University of New York at Albany’s School of Business in 2007, “I learned much of what I need to know about the real economy in my first 18 years here.”

After graduating from law school, Warsh went to Wall Street, working for Morgan Stanley & Co. from 1995 to 2002. During his tenure, he worked in mergers and acquisitions and became an executive director. He left the firm in 2002 to serve in the Bush White House. His major areas of focus included regulatory policy and consumer protection, and he served as executive secretary of the National Economic Council. In 2006, Bush nominated Warsh to become one of the Fed’s seven governors. At 35, he was the youngest person to ever serve in that role.

Warsh’s Wall Street experience came in handy during his time at the Fed, serving as an intermediary with Wall Street during the height of the Great Recession. Warsh worked closely with then-Fed Chair Ben Bernanke and New York Federal Reserve Bank President (and future Treasury Secretary) Timothy Geithner during the height of the crisis, negotiating a way for his former firm Morgan Stanley to survive the meltdown. He was also part of the Fed that instituted a policy known as “quantitative easing,” in which central banks (including the Fed) buy bonds to try to spur the economy and fend off deflation or recession.

As one of the few governors with Republican ties (Bernanke was another, appointed in 2005 by Bush), Warsh increasingly expressed concern that quantitative easing would lead to inflation. Although his term wasn’t set to end until January 2018, Warsh took the unusual action of resigning his position in March 2011. He had publicly expressed concern about the Fed’s decision to buy $600 billion in bonds in a bid to bring down interest rates and encourage more bank lending. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, he described the strategy as “limited, circumscribed and subject to regular review.”

After leaving the Fed, Warsh served as a member of the Group of Thirty (G-30, an influential group of academics and financiers focused on global economic issues); a member of the board of directors for UPS; a fellow at the conservative think tank the Hoover Institution; and a lecturer at Stanford Business School. He became an increasingly vocal critic of prolonged quantitative easing and what he viewed as the central bank’s expansion beyond its traditional mandate. In a 2018 joint appearance with Bernanke, looking back at 10 years of quantitative easing, Warsh said:

My overriding concern about continued QE, then and now, involves the misallocations of capital in the economy, and the misallocation of responsibility in our government. Misallocations seldom operate under their own name. They choose other names to hide behind. They tend to linger for years in plain sight. Until they emerge with force at the most inauspicious of times and do unexpected harm to the economy.

Warsh’s name surfaced as a candidate for Fed chair in 2017, but President Donald Trump ultimately gave the role to Powell. He later served as an unofficial adviser to Trump and was considered for the Treasury Secretary position in the second Trump administration, a role that eventually went to Scott Bessent. In the spring of 2025, when Trump was openly considering firing Powell, Warsh again emerged as a top contender to lead the Fed. In an April 2025 speech to the G-30, Warsh argued that Fed policy had gone badly awry, decrying “Forays far afield—for all seasons and all reasons—have led to systematic errors in the conduct of macroeconomic policy.”

Trump chose Warsh to succeed Powell on January 30, 2026. On May 13, the Senate confirmed Warsh by a 54–45 vote. He was sworn in as Fed chair on May 22, 2026, beginning a four-year term as chair and a 14-year term on the Fed board.

Warsh took office amid elevated inflation, rising bond yields, and pressure from Trump to lower interest rates. In his first address to the Fed’s annual economic policy symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in August 2026, Warsh signaled that inflation remained his chief concern. Although he said the economy appeared to have strengthened and the labor market was consistent with full employment, he said recent inflation readings had not convinced him that underlying price pressures were improving fast enough.

The speech also offered the clearest indication yet of how Warsh intended to put his long-standing views about the Fed into practice. He called for less reliance on forward guidance, reaffirmed the Fed’s 2% inflation target, said short-term interest rates should remain its primary monetary policy tool, and argued that unconventional policies should generally be reserved for crises. He also called for a “quieter Fed, more purposeful in its communications,” saying policymakers should avoid encouraging financial markets to depend on signals from the central bank about their next moves.

Warsh married Jane Lauder, the granddaughter of Estée Lauder, in 2002. His father-in-law Ronald Lauder has a long-standing relationship with Trump and was the first to plant the seed of the proposed U.S. annexation of Greenland with the president.