Kevin Warsh
Kevin Warsh (born April 13, 1970, Albany, New York, United States) is a former member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors (the Fed) and served as an economic policy adviser to President George W. Bush. He is considered a front-runner to succeed Fed Chair Jerome Powell when his term ends in 2026.
Early life
Warsh grew up in the Albany suburb of Loudonville, the youngest of Robert Warsh and Judith Philipson Warsh’s three children. His father ran several companies, and his mother worked as a journalist and freelance writer. He attended Shaker High School, where he played tennis, competing in the state championships.
He graduated from Stanford University in 1992 with a bachelor’s degree in public policy and with a law degree from Harvard University Law School in 1995. His law school focus included economics and regulatory policy. He also studied market economics and economic policy at Harvard Business School and MIT. Despite that august résumé, Warsh has said that much of what he understands about the way the economy works comes from his upstate New York roots, telling the State University of New York at Albany’s School of Business in 2007, “I learned much of what I need to know about the real economy in my first eighteen years here.”
Wall Street and the Fed
After graduating from law school, Warsh went to Wall Street, working for Morgan Stanley & Co. from 1995 to 2002. During his tenure he worked in mergers and acquisitions and was executive director when he left the firm in 2002 to serve in the Bush White House. His major areas of focus included regulatory policy and consumer protection, and he served as executive secretary of the National Economic Council. In 2006, Bush nominated Warsh to become one of the Fed’s seven governors. At 35, he was the youngest person to ever serve in that role.
“Forays far afield—for all seasons and all reasons—have led to systematic errors in the conduct of macroeconomic policy.”
—Kevin Warsh, criticizing Fed policy in 2025
Warsh’s Wall Street experience came in handy during his time at the Fed, serving as an intermediary with Wall Street during the height of the Great Recession. Warsh worked closely with then-Fed Chair Ben Bernanke and New York Federal Reserve Bank president (and future Treasury Secretary) Timothy Geithner during the height of the crisis, negotiating a way for his former firm Morgan Stanley to survive the meltdown. He was also part of the Fed that instituted a policy known as “quantitative easing,” in which central banks (including the Fed) buy bonds to try to spur the economy and fend off deflation or recession.
Fed facts & functions
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As one of the few governors with Republican ties (Bernanke was another, appointed in 2005 by Bush), Warsh increasingly expressed concern that quantitative easing would lead to inflation. Although his term was not set to end until January 2018, Warsh took the unusual action of resigning his position in March 2011. He had publicly expressed concern about the Fed’s decision to buy $600 billion in bonds in a bid to bring down interest rates and encourage more bank lending. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, he described the strategy as “limited, circumscribed and subject to regular review.”
A continued high profile
Since leaving the Fed, Warsh has served as a member of the Group of Thirty (G-30, an influential group of academics and financiers focused on global economic issues); a member of the board of directors for UPS; a fellow at the conservative think tank the Hoover Institution; and a lecturer at Stanford Business School. He has also made clear that the policy beliefs that led him to leave the Fed in 2011 have only become more cemented. In a 2018 joint appearance with Bernanke, looking back at 10 years of quantitative easing, Warsh noted:
My overriding concern about continued QE, then and now, involves the misallocations of capital in the economy and the misallocation of responsibility in our government. Misallocations seldom operate under their own name. They choose other names to hide behind. They tend to linger for years in plain sight. Until they emerge with force at the most inauspicious of times and do unexpected harm to the economy.
Warsh’s name surfaced as a candidate for Fed chair in 2017, but President Donald Trump ultimately gave the role to Powell. He has served as an unofficial adviser to Trump and was considered for the Treasury Secretary position in the second Trump administration, a role that eventually went to Scott Bessent. In the spring of 2025, when Trump was openly considering firing Powell, Warsh’s name again became center stage. For his part, Warsh made clear in an April 2025 speech to the G-30 that he believes Fed policy has gone badly awry, decrying “Forays far afield—for all seasons and all reasons—have led to systematic errors in the conduct of macroeconomic policy.”
Personal life
Warsh married Jane Lauder, the granddaughter of the Estée Lauder, in 2002. His father-in-law Ronald Lauder has a long-standing relationship with Trump, and was the first to plant the seed of the proposed U.S. annexation of Greenland with the president.