The Federal Reserve just recruited one of the most data-obsessed retail executives in American history to help it figure out what’s actually happening in the economy. On July 9, Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh announced the creation of five task forces designed to rethink how the central bank operates, and the one focused on economic data will be co-led by Doug McMillon, the former CEO of Walmart.
McMillon will be joined by Harvard economist Raj Chetty and University of Chicago economist Kevin Murphy. Their job: make the Fed’s economic indicators faster, more accurate, and more relevant.
Why a retail CEO belongs at the Fed’s data table
Here’s the thing about Walmart. It processes hundreds of millions of transactions across thousands of stores, giving its leadership a near-real-time pulse on consumer spending, price sensitivity, and regional economic health. McMillon spent over a decade running that machine. He knows what Americans are buying, what they’re cutting back on, and how quickly behavior shifts when prices move.
Chetty brings his own arsenal. He’s become famous for using anonymized credit card data, payroll records, and other private-sector datasets to track economic activity in something close to real time. His work during the pandemic demonstrated that high-frequency data could reveal economic shifts weeks before official government statistics caught up. Murphy, meanwhile, is a labor economist known for his empirical work on wages and human capital.
