Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh announced Thursday the individuals he has chosen to lead a wide-ranging review of how the nation’s central bank carries out its policy operations.
Below is a closer look at each of the 13 men and two women who will guide the five taskforces Warsh has established.
COMMUNICATIONS
Peter Fisher, a professor of practice at the Foster School of Business at the University of Washington, previously served as under secretary of the U.S. Treasury for domestic finance during the first two years of former President George W. Bush’s administration. Before that, he managed the System Open Market Account at the New York Fed.
Arminio Fraga is the founder and chairman of Gávea Investimentos and a former president of the Central Bank of Brazil. During the 1990s, Fraga worked at the New York investment firm of global financier George Soros. He led Brazil’s central bank from March 1999 through December 2002, a period that immediately followed the Latin American nation’s era of extreme inflation. He has since operated his own investment firm, Gavea Investments, and sits on the advisory council of the Bretton Woods Committee, which supports international economic cooperation and the work of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank Group.
Mervyn King served as governor of the Bank of England for ten years, from 2003 to 2013, a span that included the global financial crisis. He is recognized among the generation of central bankers who championed inflation targeting and greater transparency in communications.
BALANCE SHEET POLICY
Karen Dynan is a professor of economics at Harvard University. She served as chief economist at the U.S. Treasury Department from 2014 to 2017 during former President Barack Obama’s second term. Earlier in her career, she spent 17 years as a staff economist at the Fed, where she led its household and real estate finance section from 2000 to 2007.
Raghuram Rajan is a professor of finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and a former governor of the Reserve Bank of India. He led the RBI from 2013 to 2016 and, a decade before that, served as chief economist at the IMF. In 2022, he co-authored a paper for the Kansas City Fed’s annual Jackson Hole symposium examining the difficulties of reducing the Fed’s large balance sheet, titled “Liquidity Dependence: Why Shrinking Central Bank Balance Sheets is an Uphill Task.”
Jeremy Stein is a professor of economics at Harvard University and a former governor of the Federal Reserve Board. He served as a Fed governor for two years, from May 2012 to May 2014. Last year, he and two other academics co-authored a Brookings Institution paper titled “Treasury Market Dysfunction and the Role of the Central Bank,” which examined shifts in the U.S. Treasury securities market following the Fed’s large-scale bond purchases during the COVID-19 pandemic.
DATA
Raj Chetty is a professor of economics at Harvard University and leads the Opportunity Insights team there, which is widely known for influential research on the declining ability of lower-income Americans to move into the middle class. Harvard describes him as one of the youngest tenured professors in the university’s history, and his team uses large-scale data analysis to explore ways to improve outcomes for disadvantaged children.
Doug McMillon is the former president and CEO of Walmart, where he wrapped up a twelve-year tenure in January. He is credited with transforming the retail giant from a traditional big-box store into a technology-focused company capable of competing in the e-commerce space against rivals such as Amazon.
Kevin Murphy is a professor of economics at the University of Chicago. His research has centered largely on inequality, unemployment, and wage differences, as well as addiction and the economic value of advances in health and longevity, according to his university profile.
PRODUCTIVITY AND JOBS
Marc Andreessen is the cofounder and general partner of Andreessen Horowitz. He was an early pioneer of the Internet and is one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent venture capitalists. He is a well-known supporter and major financial donor to President Donald Trump and provided guidance to the administration’s cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency, known as DOGE.
Charles “Chad” Jones is a professor of economics at Stanford University, currently on leave at the Anthropic Institute. He earned a doctorate in economics from MIT in 1993 and has spent his career studying the factors that drive economic growth. In a recent paper, he outlined a scenario in which artificial intelligence could fundamentally reshape the economy by dramatically boosting productivity over several decades, while also cautioning that it would be “prudent to spend the intervening time making preparations for the potentially large consequences for labor markets, inequality, and catastrophic risk.”
Asha Sharma serves as executive vice president and Xbox CEO at Microsoft. She first joined the company after graduating from the University of Minnesota in 2011, later worked at other technology firms including Facebook and Instacart — where she was chief operating officer during its 2023 IPO — before returning to Microsoft in 2024 to oversee internal AI development. Since February of this year, she has led the company’s gaming division, which this week announced it was eliminating 3,200 jobs as part of a restructuring. Microsoft stated the positions are not being replaced by artificial intelligence, though analysts have drawn a link between the cost-cutting and the heavy investment Big Tech has made in AI.
INFLATION FRAMEWORKS
Greg Mankiw is a professor of economics at Harvard University and a former chairman of former President George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers. In 2024, he outlined views on inflation that align with those of Warsh, including skepticism about placing too much emphasis on the unemployment rate as a gauge of inflation pressure, and the notion that a central bank targeting 2% inflation should be willing to declare success when inflation rounds to that figure rather than hitting it precisely. In 2002, he co-authored a paper for the European Central Bank suggesting that an inflation-targeting central bank should use a price index that accounts for nominal wage levels; the ECB did not adopt that approach.
Thomas Sargent is a professor of economics at New York University and a 2011 Nobel laureate in economics. His published research spans a wide range of topics related to the causes of inflation. He has argued that when governments are running budget deficits, raising interest rates to combat inflation today could paradoxically lead to higher inflation down the road. In a recent paper, he attributed the Fed’s slow response to rising inflation in 2022 not only to the belief that it would be temporary, but also to uncertainty about how tight labor markets truly were and concerns that hiking rates would cause excessive economic harm.
William White is a senior fellow at the C.D. Howe Institute and a former economic adviser at the Bank for International Settlements. He earned his doctorate in economics from the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom in 1969 and held positions at both the Bank of England and the Bank of Canada before joining the BIS in 1996. There, he oversaw research and data operations and helped coordinate meetings of central bankers from around the world. During his time at the BIS, he published a critique of inflation targeting as a policy framework.
