Fed governor Lisa Cook maps out how she sees AI contributing to demand-side pressures now with the potential for a future, limited easing in those pressures as productivity benefits accrue: On the near-term outlook: “In coming months I expect to see continued pressure on inflation from the AI buildout, as discussed today, and from the pass-through of higher oil prices and supply chain disruptions associated with the conflict in the Middle East. The labor market appears to be well positioned to handle an increase in rates.” On the role of AI investment generating economy-wide demand pressures: “Attempting to fight sector-specific inflation with monetary policy could be a mistake. Our tools are too blunt to target narrow sectors, and addressing relative price shifts is not our role. Nonetheless, I see some economy-wide pressure from AI-fueled demand.”

NeutralAAPLAppleAppleCLCLWTI Crude OilWTI Crude Oil

2w ago on

Richmond Fed President Tom Barkin explained how last week's decision to raise rates followed several developments this summer that made it hard to square a wait-it-out inflation posture with Chairman Kevin Warsh's vow to get inflation back to target. "If inflation's not going to come down relatively quickly, then you have to look in the mirror and say '...maybe we should do something about it.'" The full passage from his remarks at the Economic Club of Washington, D.C.: "The way I think about what happened is [Fed Chairman] Kevin [Warsh] took the job and he made a number of, I think, very profound calls. One of which is inflation's been high for whatever it was at the time, 62 months in a row, and we probably should do something about it. And if you had a conversation, and I had a conversation with a bunch of real estate people on this last night, you could argue two sides of that case. One side is, 'Yeah it's been high, but it's really being driven by oil prices, and tariffs, and the AI build out boom. A lot of these things are going to morph on the other side.' A good example of that would be gas prices, which if you go back to June had come down and were actually in the southern part of my district in the low 3s. And so you're like, 'OK, things are coming back to normal.' Well, what happened over the summer is I think it just got a lot clearer to me and maybe to others that this gas price thing that was going to endure for a while. We had this Canada tariff thing. The tariff thing's going to endure for a while. The AI build out, this costs—Apple and a bunch of the other chip enabled tech providers raise their prices. So that's going into cost. You could add, by the way, healthcare costs, transportation costs, diesel. There's a lot of things you could throw into the cost base. And so if inflation's not going to come down relatively quickly, then you have to look in the mirror and say, 'Inflation looks like it's been here for a while, so maybe we should do something about it.' I think that's what happened."

JPMJPMorgan ChaseNeutralJPMorgan Chase

7/31/2026 on

Asked Wednesday which inflation measure he relies on, Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh gave "the proper, standard answer"—the PCE price index—then immediately qualified it: "Who knows come after next January what we might say about strategy. I suspect the task forces might have something to add." The comment drew attention from former Fed economists (as did his remarks during his Senate confirmation hearing about looking at trimmed averages). In a client note Wednesday, JPMorgan's Michael Feroli said the latest comments "seem to confirm suspicions that the task forces are just covers to redefine the inflation challenge away." This is what Warsh said 15 months earlier in a speech at the IMF: "[F]requent changes to the Fed's metrics—including its professed preferred measures of inflation—are beneath the high standing of the central bank. Central bank credibility is the coin that purchases American economic strength. In Washington, a central banker can ill-afford to be anything other than a straight-shooter."

BACBank of AmericaNeutralBank of America

6/19/2026 on

NEW: Michelle Bowman, the Federal Reserve’s vice chair of supervision, spoke at an invitation-only, private dinner that Bank of America hosted for clients in New York on Wednesday evening, hours after the central bank announced its latest policy decision She says she did not comment on monetary policy and complied with all FOMC and ethics policies https://t.co/3yXNvz4FKb

JPMJPMorgan ChaseNeutralJPMorgan Chase

6/18/2026 on

There's a difference between not telling markets your next move and not telling them how you make decisions at all. Kevin Warsh, at his first meeting as Fed chair, did both. Warsh got high marks for planting a flag on the Fed's 2% inflation target and for shearing the policy statement of jargon that had become a recitation of the obvious. But he also stretched his objection to forward guidance into something broader, using it to sidestep questions about how the committee reasons toward a decision. "It matters to have some sense of how this committee is thinking about how it goes about conducting this business," said JPMorgan's Michael Feroli.