The Great Game for the Fed

Food for Thought

Food for thought.

The Great Game Comes for the Fed. Kevin Warsh's arrival at the Federal Reserve would mean more than a new chairman. It would mean that the great new game, the struggle over energy, industry, data, payments, borders, and national power, has finally reached the central bank. The old pretense that the Fed stands above politics, above history, and above the national interest is collapsing. Good. It never was true.

Trump and Andrew Jackson belong to the same American tradition: both understood that concentrated financial power quickly becomes political power. Jackson fought the Bank of the United States because he saw that institutions claiming neutrality often serve entrenched elites. Trump is now applying that same instinct to the modern monetary establishment. The target is no longer Nicholas Biddle's bank but the western central-bank system, the Fed, the ECB, the Bank of England, and their peers, that has spent decades passing ideology off as expertise.

That ideology is a stale misuse of Keynes. The General Theory was written for depression conditions and then marketed by generations of disciples as if it were a timeless manual for all economies in all eras. That is how the Fed ended up treating supply shocks as inflation, backward-looking shelter data as revelation, and every market tremor as an excuse for balance-sheet manipulation. Across the west, the same script still reigns: manage aggregate demand, massage expectations, defend the inflation target, and assume more central-bank discretion is always a mark of sophistication.

Warsh represents a different possibility. He and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent are linked through Stanley Druckenmiller, which means a Warsh Fed would not operate in splendid isolation from Treasury but in strategic coordination with it. That will horrify the status quo, and it should be expected. The status quo should be horrified. Trump's America First policy is not just about tariffs or border control. It is about restoring economic sovereignty through innovation, productivity, energy abundance, and supply-side reform.