The Federal Reserve has announced the leaders of five outside task forces formed by Chairman Kevin Warsh to drive sweeping reforms at the central bank.
The panels bring together an unusually diverse group of figures from finance, academia, and the corporate world, reflecting Warsh’s deliberate push to open the institution to outside voices.
Among the most prominent appointments is former Walmart (WMT) President and CEO Doug McMillon, who will co-lead the Data task force alongside two leading academic economists.
McMillon will be joined on the Data panel by Raj Chetty, professor of economics at Harvard University, and Kevin Murphy, professor of economics at the University of Chicago.
The Data task force carries a mandate to improve the quality and timeliness of real economic signals that directly inform the Federal Reserve’s policy judgments.
Warsh has been vocal about his desire to move the Fed away from what he considers problematic government reports and toward faster, more reliable economic indicators.
“My favorite data is upon us, and if we do our jobs, we’ll be here a year from now, and we’ll say we’ve discovered data that helps us make better decisions,” Warsh said.
The appointment of a retail giant’s former chief executive to a data reform panel signals that Warsh believes corporations like Walmart sit on vast troves of real-time spending and inflation intelligence.
The Fed currently uses a wide array of government, private-sector, and in-house data, both public and non-public, to track the economy and set interest rates to support employment and control inflation.
The Fed’s Beige Book already attempts to capture real-time economic changes through outreach to business leaders, but Warsh appears to want something more systematic and rigorous in its approach.
Beyond the Data panel, Warsh announced four additional task forces covering Communications, Balance Sheet Policy, Productivity and Jobs and AI, and Inflation.
Top venture capitalist Marc Andreessen will co-lead the Productivity, Jobs, and AI task force alongside Asha Sharma, the Microsoft executive who leads its Xbox division.
The Inflation task force will include Greg Mankiw, former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush, and Nobel laureate Thomas Sargent of New York University.
The Communications panel will be led by Peter R. Fisher of the University of Washington, Arminio Fraga of Gávea Investimentos, and Mervyn King, former governor of the Bank of England.
The Balance Sheet Policy task force will be co-led by Karen Dynan and Jeremy Stein of Harvard University and Raghuram Rajan of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
All five task forces will be supported by Federal Reserve staff and are expected to operate independently, following the evidence and delivering candid, rigorous findings to the Federal Open Market Committee.
The panels are expected to recommend concrete policy changes to the Fed before the end of the year, putting Warsh’s reform agenda on a tight and closely watched timeline.
