Trump's Fed Pick Warsh Wants To Ditch The Central Bank's Go‑To Inflation Gauge

Kevin Warsh wants to retire the inflation gauge the Federal Reserve has relied on for two decades.
Speaking at his Senate confirmation hearing on Tuesday, President Donald Trump‘s pick to replace Jerome Powell dismissed core personal consumption expenditures — the Fed’s preferred measure of underlying price pressure — as a “rough swag as to what was going on” with prices.
He wants to replace it with trimmed-mean and median PCE, alternative gauges produced by the Dallas and Cleveland Feds.
The swap sounds technical. It would move the Fed 70 basis points closer to the target on paper without a single price changing.
How The Fed's Favorite Inflation Gauge Could Change
Core PCE, the measure the Fed has leaned on since the mid-2000s, works by a simple rule: take the full basket of what American