Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh has revealed himself. If not a card-carrying monetarist, he is at least a camp follower. This represents a dramatic change at the Fed, where Jerome Powell, the past chairman, repeatedly rejected the basic tenets of monetarism.
This is a welcomed earthquake. After all, there are almost no monetarists left in the world (except for us, and we’ve been fighting a lonely rearguard action for over 40 years). The Federal Reserve has rejected monetarism consistently — and on the record — because it preferred other models for understanding the economy. In academia, monetarism has been out of fashion for decades. But by his own words, a monetarist is now leading the central bank.
