#Polymarket每日热点 Where is the Federal Reserve under Kevin Waugh headed?

The long-anticipated transition of the Federal Reserve Chairmanship has been completed, with the new Chair Kevin Waugh officially sworn in at the White House recently. Based on his past remarks, and considering 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 Waugh headed?
Kevin Waugh once served as a research assistant to Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, advocating 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 Waugh believes the essence is monetary over-issuance plus fiscal recklessness; Friedman’s MV=PQ is the true principle. To control inflation, all that’s needed is to tighten the overall monetary throttle, which is also one of the underlying logic behind his advocacy for balance sheet reduction.
Ben Bernanke pioneered QE during the financial crisis, and later Yellen normalized it. Powell exponentially 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. Waugh 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 Waugh and the previous three Fed chairs is the decision-making mechanism. The Yellen-Powell camp considers core PCE as the most important indicator, heavily influencing monetary policy, but Waugh believes that core PCE’s description of price trends is only “rough guesswork,” and he does not fully trust the data. Early in his career, Waugh 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, acting more as an empiricist relying on “feelings + statistics” for rate decisions. Waugh’s philosophy is more likely a combination of Paul Volcker and Greenspan.
Before Bernanke, Fed Chairs took their oaths of office at the White House; Bernanke was the first to move it to the Fed building to demonstrate independence. Waugh’s return to the White House for his swearing-in is intriguing and has sparked speculation about paying homage to Greenspan.
Another reason Waugh opposes the Yellen-Powell camp is that he believes 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 when data doesn’t meet expectations, markets can swing violently, leading to the Fed being hostage to market expectations and diluting its authority. Waugh’s policy approach 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).
Waugh is clearly labeled as a “reformer,” possibly the biggest anomaly among recent Fed Chairs, with ideas vastly different from his three predecessors, implying that traditional data-dependent forecasting frameworks may no longer apply to the Fed’s monetary policy under his leadership. In the future, the Fed may 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 appear lower enough to justify 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 in the previous budget, indicating that U.S. fiscal spending will remain high this year, and the pressure to issue Treasuries remains significant. 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 Treasuries will act as a soft constraint on potential rate hikes. Trump is more likely to facilitate rate cuts by ending Middle East conflicts early, helping crude oil prices fall quickly.
Last weekend, positive progress was made in US-Iran negotiations, with the Strait of Hormuz expected to reopen—coinciding with Kevin Waugh’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 new non-farm jobs 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 records (dating back to 2002). Specifically, almost all private sector figures were revised downward, indicating the issue is not an anomaly in a particular industry but a 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 prompted Powell’s cautious approach to rate cuts, with a 50 basis point cut in September 2024 exceeding market expectations. It shows that large downward revisions of past non-farm data can open the door for rate cuts.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 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, represented by 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 hold steady in their first month. However, most provide forward guidance and dot plots. Waugh has previously explicitly opposed the dot plot, believing the Fed should speak with a unified voice rather than individual governors expressing their views, which is more similar to Greenspan’s style. Waugh emphasized reform-oriented policies during his inauguration, making him highly likely to become a disruptive figure in Fed history.
In summary, the Fed could modify inflation statistics and revise previous non-farm data downward to create conditions for rate cuts. Waugh may, in the early stages, quietly push through these changes without signaling clearly, leading to earlier rate cuts than expected.