President Donald Trump, who is an inflation dove, announced Friday morning that he will name Kevin Warsh—whose past record is that of an inflation hawk—to succeed Jerome Powell as chairman of the Federal Reserve. Trump has been so desperate to lower interest rates that last year he contemplated firing Powell, whose views on monetary policy are fairly mainstream. Now he’s nominating somebody who, unless he’s undergone a complete ideological transformation, will displease Trump even more.

In the past, Warsh has been such an inflation hawk that when he was a Federal Reserve governor in April 2009, he pronounced himself “more worried about upside risks to inflation than downside risks.” This was at a time when the consumer price index, or CPI, was negative 0.4 percent, unemployment was 8.9 percent, and the economy was in a recession that turned out to be the longest and deepest downturn since the Great Depression. During the decade that followed, inflation never rose above 3.2 percent, and mostly stayed below 2 percent.

Today, inflation is 2.7 percent, which doesn’t worry me particularly. But that’s 0.3 points higher than it stood in the last CPI report, released before Trump won the 2024 election by claiming inflation was “the worst we’ve ever had.” (Trump turned inflation hawk temporarily so he could bash President Joe Biden.) There’s every reason to believe that Trump’s tariffs (assuming the Supreme Court doesn’t strike them down) will push inflation higher. The Warsh of April 2009 would be apoplectic about that.

But the Warsh of January 2026 is unconcerned—or........

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