Marc Andreessen and former Walmart CEO are among the new Fed task force leaders
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Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen. Photo: Craig T Fruchtman/WireImage
The Federal Reserve on Thursday announced leaders of five outside task forces that chairman Kevin Warsh has formed in his push to reform the central bank — a list that includes a number of outsiders to the often insular institution.
Driving the news: The panels include a range of well-known figures from finance and economics, as well as business — including top venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and former Walmart CEO Doug McMillon.
- Other bold-faced names include former top central bankers in other countries: Mervyn King, the former governor of the Bank of England, Raghuram Rajan, former governor of the Reserve Bank of India, and Arminio Fraga, former president of the Central Bank of Brazil.
- Prominent economists participating include Greg Mankiw, Karen Dynan, Jeremy Stein, and Raj Chetty, all at Harvard, as well as Charles I. Jones, a Stanford professor on leave at the AI firm Anthropic, and Thomas Sargent, a New York University professor and Nobel laureate.
State of play: Warsh envisions rethinking core precepts of how the Fed operates and is charging the five task forces, led by Fed outsiders, to develop ideas and recommendations by year-end.
- They are meant to operate independently, with support from Fed staff, and report their findings to the Fed's monetary policy-setting panel, the Federal Open Market Committee.
What they're saying: "The U.S. economy has changed significantly over the last generation, and never more so than right now," Warsh said in a statement announcing the members.
- "Each task force will carefully consider whether policymakers' means and methods, analytical tools and policy approaches can be improved upon."
- "I am honored that the best minds from a range of disciplines have agreed to work with us to sharpen our performance as an institution," he said.
Zoom in: A task force on Fed communications will be led by Peter R. Fisher, a former Treasury official now at the University of Washington, along with Fraga and King.
- A task force on the Fed's balance sheet policy will be led by Dynan, Rajan and Stein.
- A task force on improving the quality of economic data will be led by Chetty, McMillon and Kevin Murphy of the University of Chicago.
- A task force on productivity, job, and AI will be led by Andreessen, Jones, and Asha Sharma, the Microsoft executive who leads its Xbox division.
- A task force on inflation frameworks will be led by Mankiw, Sargent and William White of the C.D. Howe Institute, a Canadian think tank.
