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At Jackson Hole, the Fed Is Speaking to a Market That Never Sleeps

Kevin Warsh’s first Jackson Hole address will be delivered to a room of human policymakers, but its signals will reach a global market that never closes and increasingly responds without waiting for human interpretation.

On Friday, Kevin Warsh will step to the lectern in Grand Teton National Park and deliver his first address as chair of the Federal Reserve. The setting is, as always, almost defiantly analog. The Kansas City Fed’s Jackson Hole Economic Symposium is invitation-only, deliberately small, held far from any trading floor and conducted at the considered pace of people who have the room to think. It is one of the most closely watched communications events in global finance, and almost nothing about how it is staged resembles the financial system that will receive it.

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That is the mismatch worth sitting with. The Fed sets no interest rate at Jackson Hole. Its instrument there is language. A chair chooses words, and markets parse them for signals about what comes next. For most of the symposium’s history, the model assumed a particular kind of audience: one largely concentrated in a few time zones, made up of humans who would hear a speech, weigh........

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