#Polymarket每日热点 Where is the Federal Reserve under Kevin Woeh's leadership heading?

The highly anticipated transition of the Federal Reserve Chairmanship has been completed, with the new Chair Kevin Woeh officially sworn in at the White House recently. Based on his past remarks and the current resurgence of inflation pressures in the United States, the market generally expects that the Fed will turn hawkish after his appointment, with interest rate futures markets even beginning to price in rate hikes within the year. So, where is the Federal Reserve under Kevin Woeh heading?

Kevin Woeh once served as a research assistant to Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, a proponent of monetarism, and his policy views differ significantly from those of Yellen and Powell. The Yellen-Powell camp believes inflation stems from structural and external shocks such as supply chain bottlenecks, wage-price spirals, and overheated demand. But Woeh believes the core issue is monetary over-issuance and fiscal recklessness; the equation MV=PQ from Friedman is the truth. To control inflation, all that is needed is to tighten the monetary throttle, which is also one of the underlying logic behind his advocacy for balance sheet reduction.
Bernanke pioneered QE after the financial crisis, and Yellen normalized it. Powell dramatically expanded it during his tenure (unlimited QE during the pandemic increased the Fed’s balance sheet to nearly $9 trillion), resulting in blurred boundaries between the central bank and the Treasury, effectively enabling Congress to spend without limits. Woeh has criticized this: “The Fed is more like a government agency than a focused central bank, and this institutional drift has led to systemic errors.”

Another major difference between Woeh and the previous three Fed chairs lies in decision-making mechanisms. The Yellen-Powell camp considers core PCE as the most important indicator, heavily influencing monetary policy, but Woeh believes that core PCE’s description of price trends is only “rough speculation” and does not blindly trust the data. Early in his career, Woeh was heavily influenced by Greenspan’s philosophy; both are not typical academics. Greenspan, one of the longest-serving Fed chairs in history, tends to believe in market self-regulation, reducing Fed intervention, and acts more as an empiricist relying on “feelings + statistics” for rate decisions. Woeh’s approach is more likely a combination of Paul Volcker and Greenspan.
Bernanke’s predecessors usually took their oaths of office at the White House; Bernanke was the first to move it inside the Fed to demonstrate independence. Woeh’s return to the White House for his swearing-in is intriguing and has sparked speculation about paying homage to Greenspan.
Another reason Woeh opposes the Yellen-Powell camp is his belief that the Fed talks too much. “Forward Guidance + dot plots + post-meeting press conferences”—this highly transparent process often allows markets to predict Fed actions, and any data that deviates from expectations causes sharp volatility, leading to the Fed being hostage to market expectations and diluting its authority. Woeh’s policy philosophy may revert to Greenspan’s “ambiguity,” likely canceling routine press conferences, abolishing dot plots, and cutting back on forward guidance, transforming the Fed from an “explanatory central bank” back into a “mysterious central bank” (early Volcker-Greenspan style).

Woeh is clearly labeled as a “reformer,” possibly the biggest outsider among recent Fed chairs, with ideas vastly different from his three predecessors. This suggests that traditional data-dependent forecasting frameworks may not be suitable for predicting the monetary policy under Woeh’s leadership. In the future, the Fed might pave the way for rate cuts by modifying inflation measurement methods (removing the highest and lowest values to form a weighted average, thus making inflation more conducive to easing). Trump, unusually, expressed support for Fed independence, possibly reflecting greater confidence in future rate cuts. The previous “Big Beautiful” bill narrowly passed the House, with a 10% increase over the previous budget, indicating that U.S. fiscal spending will remain high this year, with significant Treasury issuance pressure. The total U.S. debt surpassing $40 trillion is only a matter of time. Under such circumstances, even if Trump no longer publicly pressures the Fed to cut rates, the interest payment burden on U.S. debt will act as a soft constraint on potential rate hikes. Trump is more likely to accelerate ending Middle East conflicts to bring down oil prices quickly, creating conditions for Fed rate cuts.
Last weekend, positive progress was made in US-Iran negotiations, with the Strait of Hormuz expected to reopen—coinciding with Woeh’s recent inauguration, which is unlikely to be purely coincidental and may set the stage for his first hawkish stance in June.
In terms of employment, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released preliminary results of the annual benchmark revision on September 9, 2025: the net non-farm jobs added from April 2024 to March 2025 were cut by 911k compared to the initially reported monthly data—equivalent to an average monthly overestimation of about 76k jobs. Originally, the monthly increase was about 147k, but after revision, it was nearly halved to about 71k/month. This is the largest downward revision in the BLS’s records (dating back to 2002). Specifically, almost all private sectors were revised downward, indicating the issue is not sector-specific but systemic overestimation. Essentially, the nearly comprehensive tax wage records (UI data) were forcibly aligned with the previously sampled and modeled monthly non-farm data, indicating that the U.S. labor market has been weakening since 2024.
This downward revision of non-farm data directly led to the Fed’s rate cut in September last year, fueling a sharp rally in gold and silver. Looking further back, the significant downward adjustment of 2023 employment data in 2024 directly caused Powell, who has been cautious about rate cuts, to cut rates by 50 basis points in September 2024—exceeding market expectations. It shows that large downward revisions of past non-farm data can open the door for rate cuts.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that in April this year, the U.S. added 115k jobs, exceeding Wall Street expectations for the second consecutive month. Meanwhile, March’s data was revised upward to 185k, with the unemployment rate holding steady at 4.3%. On the surface, the labor market appears unexpectedly resilient. But a closer look reveals that temporary employment contributed significantly, while long-term stable employment, such as household employment, has been declining. The actual U.S. labor market may be far less robust than the data suggests.
Generally, new Fed chairs tend to keep a low profile in their first month. However, most give forward guidance and dot plots. Woeh has previously explicitly opposed dot plots, believing the Fed should speak with a unified voice rather than individual board members expressing their views, which is more in line with Greenspan’s style. During his inauguration, Woeh emphasized reform-oriented policies, making it highly likely he will become a disruptive figure in Fed history.
In summary, the Fed could modify inflation statistics and revise past non-farm data downward to create conditions for rate cuts. Woeh may, without signaling obvious intentions early on, push through with these measures, leading to earlier rate cuts than expected.