Kevin Warsh buried an unusual, unhedged promise in his first Fed minutes—and one economist says it’s the strongest signal in the document

Buried in the Federal Reserve’s June policy statement—the shortest of Kevin Warsh’s young tenure as chair—is a single sentence with no qualifiers, no hedges, and, according to at least one longtime Fed watcher, more signal than anything in the minutes released Wednesday: “The Committee will deliver price stability.”

“There’s not a qualifying statement after that,” said Laura Ullrich, a former senior regional economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond who now directs economic research at the Indeed Hiring Lab. “It doesn’t say the committee will deliver price stability while also blah blah blah blah. It doesn’t have a qualifying statement.”

Despite its brevity, she called it “a very short, but very strong statement.” It read as an unhedged commitment that doesn’t usually appear in a document over which every word is fought over by the 19 people who make up the Federal Open Market Committee.

The minutes confirmed what Warsh had already previewed at his post-meeting press conference: a “family fight” over where rates go next. The FOMC voted unanimously on June 17 to hold the benchmark rate at 3.5%-3.75% for a fourth straight meeting—the first unanimous vote in some time. A handful of participants saw a case for raising rates immediately but agreed to go along with the hold. The rest of the committee split over where things should stand by December: many said the appropriate rate was at or slightly below the current range, while the minutes noted “many other participants” argued it needed to be higher. The minutes noted only that future action “would depend on incoming information.”

But the division itself isn’t new information so much as confirmation of what the June dot plot already showed: nine of 18 officials penciled in at least one hike before year-end, a reversal from March’s cut-leaning median. Fortune reported........

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