WASHINGTON — The Federal Reserve has revealed the names of prominent figures who will help guide recommended changes to how the nation’s central bank functions. Among those named Thursday are venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, economist Raj Chetty, and former Bank of England governor Mervyn King.
The three are among the co-leaders of five separate task forces that Fed Chair Kevin Warsh announced last month. The remaining leaders represent a mix of business executives and public officials.
Warsh had called for “regime change” at the Fed last year while he was being considered by the Trump administration to take over from former chair Jerome Powell. Since taking the helm, Warsh has signaled a desire to share less publicly about the Fed’s interest rate thinking and has expressed interest in trimming the central bank’s approximately $6.7 trillion in government bond holdings.
Still, it remains to be seen just how much impact these task forces will have. Most of the directors announced Thursday are respected names in economics and business — not longtime critics of the Fed. Those who follow the central bank closely say Warsh’s decision to use task forces suggests he’s looking to build consensus among fellow Fed officials rather than force through changes unilaterally.
“The U.S. economy has changed significantly over the last generation, and never more so than right now,” Warsh said in a written statement. “Each task force will carefully consider whether policymakers’ means and methods, analytical tools and policy approaches can be improved upon.”
Each of the five task forces will have three co-leaders and will receive support from Fed staff, according to the central bank.
One task force will zero in on how artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies could reshape productivity and the job market. Warsh has frequently stated his belief that AI will bring sweeping changes to the American economy.
Leading that effort will be Andreessen, a major investor in both AI technology and cryptocurrency firms. Joining him will be Asha Sharma, an executive vice president at Microsoft and CEO of its Xbox division, along with Charles Jones, a Stanford economist currently on leave with Anthropic.
Chetty, who teaches at Harvard, will co-lead a task force focused on the data sources the Fed relies on. He has built a reputation for using massive data sets to follow families’ financial trajectories across generations and identify which parts of the country have seen the greatest economic mobility.
Also co-leading that data task force are Doug McMillon, the former president and CEO of Walmart, and Kevin Murphy, an economics professor at the University of Chicago.
A third task force will take a hard look at the Fed’s balance sheet, which has grown substantially since the Great Recession of 2008-2009. Co-leading that group are Raghuram Rajan, a former head of the Reserve Bank of India; Harvard economist and former Treasury official Karen Dynan; and Jeremy Stein, a former Fed governor.
Greg Mankiw, who served as a top economist in the George W. Bush administration, and Thomas Sargent, a Nobel laureate at New York University, will co-lead a task force on inflation frameworks. Meanwhile, King, the former Bank of England governor, will be among the leaders of the task force focused on Fed communications.
