Kevin Warsh, the 17th Chair of the Federal Reserve, wants to fundamentally change how the central bank talks to markets. His target: the forward guidance playbook that has defined Fed communications for more than a decade.
Warsh was sworn in on May 22, 2026, after a Senate confirmation vote of 54-45 on May 13. He succeeds Jerome Powell. And he’s wasting no time signaling that the Powell era’s communication style is on its way out.
The case against the dot plot
Warsh has called for what he describes as “regime change” at the Fed. In practice, that means scaling back two tools that have become pillars of modern central banking: forward guidance and the dot plot.
For the uninitiated, the dot plot is a chart where each Fed official anonymously marks where they think interest rates should be at various points in the future. In English: it’s the Fed’s version of a group text where everyone shares their rate predictions, and markets obsess over every shift.
