International Man: Kevin Warsh looks likely to replace Jerome Powell as Fed chair, and the market seems to assume he'll be more willing to cut rates than Powell was. What's your take on him?

Doug Casey: Before we look at Warsh, let's look at what a Fed Chair can do.

The Fed has 12 governors, but we generally only hear about the Chairman. While he's only got one of the 12 votes, the others traditionally follow his lead because of his prominence and extra powers. He's the major, even the sole, spokesperson for the Fed. He has several emergency powers, which in today's unstable world are more important than ever. It's the Chair who gives testimony to the Congress, spinning things as he thinks best. He has direct control over the Fed's roughly 25 thousand employees, including about a thousand PhD economists.

The Fed chair is also the head of the Fed Open Market Committee, the FMOC, which is the most important part of the bureaucracy because it determines what the Fed buys and sells, and sets interest rates. The FMOC also has 12 members, including seven of the Fed governors, plus five of the twelve regional Reserve Bank Presidents.

It's often said that the Fed Chair is the second most powerful man in the country. I presume Warsh took the job, although he's already rich (said to be worth about 200 million dollars), because he wants to become even richer, more powerful, and more famous. He was the youngest ever appointee to the Fed at age 35. He's now 58, so he's been walking the halls of power for his entire life. His personal wealth is trivial next to that of his wife, worth almost two billion dollars as an heir to the Estee Lauder fortune.