Kevin Warsh’s long-held desire to slash the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet is likely to clash with Donald Trump’s relentless calls for the central bank to depress long-term borrowing costs, big fund managers have said.
Longer-dated Treasury yields rose on Friday as investors bet Trump’s nomination of Warsh to lead the world’s most influential central bank could push up borrowing costs. The move pushed the difference between 30-year and two-year debt yields — a measure that is closely watched on Wall Street — to 1.35 percentage points, close to the biggest gap since 2021.
The market fluctuations are an early sign of how traders are assessing Warsh’s statements in recent years, in which he has criticised the central bank for the scale of its bond purchases during the 2008 financial crisis — when he was a Fed governor — and later during the 2020 pandemic.