Who is Trump's Fed chair pick?
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Who is Kevin Warsh and what is his background?
president has chosen his nominee for second most powerful economic policy position in the country. I'm David Brancaccio in Los Angeles. This morning, President Trump revealed his choice to lead the Federal Reserve. It is Kevin Warsh, a former Fed governor and more recent Fed critic. If confirmed by the Senate, Warsh would replace Jerome Powell, whose term expires in May. Warsh had called for, quote, regime change at the Fed, Marketplace's Nova Safo reports.
Kevin Warsh served as Fed governor from 2006 until 2011, a time span that included the financial crisis and the Federal Reserve's efforts to stabilize Wall Street. He's a visiting fellow in economics at Stanford's Hoover Institution, a conservative-leaning think tank. Warsh has recently criticized the Federal Reserve, saying that it has not done enough in the past to fight inflation. Here he is speaking at the Hoover Institution.
The central bank can hit any price level that it wants, any inflation level that it wants. We might not like how they do it, but the idea that is they should be blaming someone else strikes me as quite antithetical to good economic history.
Warsh believes the Fed now should lower interest rates more, something President Trump has called for. Warsh says doing so won't trigger more inflation because artificial intelligence and its advancements will boost productivity. Higher productivity has historically been a deflationary force. Warsh also wants less intervention in financial markets and a more hands-off approach at the Fed toward bank regulation. I'm Novosafo for Marketplace.
With electricity-hungry artificial intelligence, there's concern about power shortages, higher bills for consumers, and environmental degradation. Some big companies are paying to restart nuclear plants. On a different scale, there's Redwood Materials, a startup that takes used electric vehicle batteries to help power a data center in, for instance, Nevada. Colin Campbell is chief technology officer at Redwood Materials.
What that is is 60 megawatt hours and 12 megawatts of reused electric vehicle batteries powering a data center completely disconnected from the grid. It only took us four months to build.
That's just a slice from our series from my colleagues Megan McCarty Carino and Kai Risdahl on this AI boom. Among the angles, comparing similarities and differences between AI fever now and the dot-com bubble and bust from the turn of the century, Marketplace Tech, Marketplace's half-hour program, and us here in the morning have parts of that.
Now in Malagasy, the language of Madagascar. That means I speak Malagasy really badly. But I can't at least say that because I lived in Madagascar for my ninth grade.
What are Kevin Warsh's views on the Federal Reserve's actions?
Long story why, but among the many things I can tell you about that island nation off of East Africa, it really has lemurs, its economy is challenged, and the ruts on its red earth roads could swallow a Volkswagen. So when our colleagues at the BBC pitched a story about Madagascar opening its first stretch of modern highway, I was especially interested in the economic, ecological and cultural impacts. Here's reporter Andre Lombard.
Life in the driving seat isn't always easy in Madagascar. Twice a week, Reker makes the long return journey between the capital Antananarivo and the country's biggest port, Torremacina, a trip he says can take up to 16 hours. All this in a country the IMF says has some of the worst roads on the continent. The current road is really bad. It's very narrow and there are loads of trucks.
It makes me very worried.
But that could all be about to change. The first eight kilometres of a new highway that links the two cities together has been inaugurated. Eventually, it will stretch 240 kilometres, budgeted to cost a billion dollars. Some of that money will be recouped in tolls, but it's hoped the main payday will come through the increased trade the road will bring. Journey times are predicted to reduce to around two and a half hours and certainly as we turn onto the new road, its smooth tarmac is a big change from the rough and ready current road.
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