Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh's reluctance to signal where interest rates are headed has left the world unsure just how he thinks about the economy or inflation. Fortunately, there is a trove of evidence on exactly how he thinks, if you know where to look.

As a Federal Reserve governor from 2007 through 2011, Warsh submitted projections every quarter for growth, unemployment and inflation, alongside his colleagues on the committee that sets interest rates. The forecasts became public only years later, by which point he had left the central bank.

Those projections, and accompanying transcripts, show a policymaker whose views on inflation diverged from those of his colleagues as the 2007-09 crisis receded. Other officials saw 9% unemployment as slack that would keep prices down. Warsh took a different view. He thought the crisis, along with government policies he considered unfriendly to growth, had durably raised unemployment, which therefore wouldn't hold prices down to the degree his colleagues believed.

Now Warsh chairs the same committee. How it votes turns on how officials think the economy works: which forces are temporary, which are structural, and what makes prices rise.

The economy today poses challenges different from the ones Warsh and his colleagues faced 15 years ago. Unemployment is low, and inflation has run above the Fed's 2% target for five years.

Many on Wall Street applauded Warsh's appointment, seeing his record from 15 years ago as proof he is instinctively tough on inflation. But there's an alternative interpretation. Warsh may have a more unconventional view of what causes inflation, rooted less in demand-side indicators such as unemployment and more in the supply side and government policies.

Over the past year, he has suggested that AI-driven advances could give the economy more room to grow and that technology tends to lower costs over time. When asked last month how he reads the economy today, he described the same problem he faced 15 years ago. "We're inferring aggregate supply," he said. "We're making a judgment about what productivity is."

For most of the decade after Warsh left the Fed, inflation ran below where officials expected, not above. The unemployment rate kept steadily falling, to 3.5% by 2020, reaching levels far below what Warsh or even his most optimistic colleagues thought was likely. Price pressures were tame.

Growth did disappoint, as Warsh and his colleagues feared. What set him apart was his explanation. He cited regulatory, fiscal and trade policies that he said had turned unfriendly to growth and damaged what the economy could produce. A smaller economy, in his telling, would hit its limits sooner and leave it more vulnerable to inflation shocks from abroad. For many years the economy ran cool on both growth and inflation. The inflation Warsh warned about arrived a decade late, and it took a pandemic and a wave of stimulus to bring it.

The forecasting exercise Warsh participated in from 2007-11 received less attention than it does today. The projections were released weeks after each meeting in an addendum to the minutes of those discussions. The forecasts took on a greater role within months of his departure, when the Fed began releasing them at the same time as its policy decision. In 2012 it added the interest rate each official thought appropriate, the chart known as the dot plot.

It is now the central bank's most scrutinized communication, and Warsh has been one of its chief critics. At his first meeting as chairman in June, he declined to submit either an interest-rate or an economic projection. "These forecasts have been abysmal. My dots wouldn't be perfect either, so I wouldn't give them," he told a private audience in June 2025.

His assignment now is different from when he left the Fed in 2011. It requires reading an economy in the middle of a technology shock nobody can yet size, and to do it while inflation has run above target for five years.