His resignation was confirmed by White House spokesman Kush Desai late Tuesday.

President Donald Trump appointed Miran in September to a seat on the Fed’s seven-member board of governors after Adriana Kugler, who was appointed by President Joe Biden, abruptly resigned.

Federal Reserve governor Stephen Miran resigned from his position as chair of the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers. AP

Miran completed her term, which ended Jan. 31.

Yet he can remain on the Fed’s board until a replacement is confirmed by the Senate.

It is unusual for someone to keep a White House position while also serving as a Fed governor, a nonpartisan position.

Previous presidents have appointed aides to the Fed, but for decades they gave up their White House positions before joining the Fed. Miran took an unpaid leave of absence instead.

Miran said when he was named in September that he would step down from his position at the CEA if he remained on the Fed board after Jan. 31.

Miran’s tenure ended on Jan. 31 as White House spokesman Kush Desai confirmed his departure from his position late Tuesday. AFP via Getty Images

Fed governors vote on interest rate decisions and bank regulatory policy.

“In accordance with the pledge he made to the Senate during his confirmation to the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, Stephen Miran has submitted his resignation from the Council of Economic Advisers,” Desai said.

The move underscores the intrigue around the Fed and its upcoming personnel changes.

Trump has nominated Kevin Warsh, a former Fed official, to replace current Fed chair Jerome Powell, whose term atop the central bank ends May 15.

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Yet Powell could, under a quirk in the Fed’s structure, remain on the board after his term as chair ends and deny Trump the opportunity to fill another seat.

Many observers, as result, expect Warsh to take Miran’s seat and then be elevated to replace Powell in May, but that sequence of events hasn’t yet been confirmed.

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The latter happens to be President Trump, whose instincts are to rev the economy to 6% growth and worry about inflation later.

His instincts are also to jawbone any Fed chair to make that happen even if it means slashing interest rates to zero. 

If anyone can walk this very precarious line, it’s Kevin Warsh. 

That’s because Warsh has been preparing for this day for at least a couple of decades.

He knows the Fed has been on dangerous ground in recent years straying from its “dual mandate” to maintain low inflation while it seeks strong employment in controlling the nation’s money supply.

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After all the drama over Trump’s decision, it’s time not only for relief but also cele­bration. 

The first time I met Warsh was in 2008.

The economy was on the precipice.

He was a Fed governor, one of the key officials at the central bank making sure the US economy didn’t implode in a 1930s-style wipeout as the banking crisis was cascading through the financial system. 

Warsh had some government experience, but he really cut his teeth as an investment banker at Morgan Stanley, with real-world knowledge of what the financial sector means to the overall economy. 

He and Tim Geithner, the New York Fed chief who was soon to become President Obama’s Treasury secretary, working alongside President George W. Bush’s Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and then Fed Chair Ben Bernanke, saved the banking system and the economy from Armageddon by flooding the system with cheap money when it needed it most. 

What Warsh did next, in my opinion, was even more important.

Effectively, he cast himself as a Cassandra, warning that a policy that worked well in the middle of a crisis was now setting the economy up for runaway inflation, the most important concern for any Fed chair. 

Now decamped to Stanford University as an academic, he began firing off columns on the need to rein in the Fed.

He saw — and rightly criticized — Bernanke, then Janet Yellen and the current Fed chair, Jerome Powell, who was appointed during Trump 1, for continuing to juice the economy, printing money and steering longer-term interest rates lower as if they were part of the White House’s economic team. 

He took aim at the central bank’s ever-broader policy pursuits, its support of lefty social issues, stuff like Diversity Equity and Inclusion hiring practices, and Environmental, Social, Governance investing. 

This wasn’t just because DEI was illegal, and ESG was foolhardy, it was also because the Fed in taking these left turns also took its eye off the inflation ball and its mandate as the nation’s central bank. 

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By the Biden years, with Powell still in charge and still printing money, Warsh’s prognostications were an unfortunate reality.

Inflation raged to 9%, a noxious tax on the working class that doesn’t have the disposable income to speculate around its ravages with financial assets. 

Finally, Powell stopped printing money and raised rates, but the damage was done. With so much money sloshing around, prices remained elevated (as they do today), which is why Donald Trump, warts and all, would have defeated Joe Biden and did beat Biden’s equally economically illiterate vice president, Kamala Harris, in the 2024 presidential election. 

Didn’t listen to the pro 

Yes, average folks tend to look past indictments and mean tweets when stuff like food, housing and energy becomes unaffordable because the president and his policymakers didn’t listen to Kevin Warsh. 

The question is, will Trump will listen?

Warsh, once confirmed by the Senate, will take over when Powell’s term ends on May 15.

Inflation remains elevated above its target rate of 2%, but Trump wants lower rates, which makes his pick of a hawk like Warsh an odd one. 

Recall, Warsh beat out one-time Trump favorite Kevin Hassett, chief of the president’s National Economic Council, who seemed prepared to run the most accommodative Fed in years.

One reason Trump went with Warsh, I am told, is that the president listened to Wall Street and heard you can’t have a patsy at the Fed willing to inflate the economy at all costs if you want people to buy your debt, and Warsh is pretty far from a patsy. 

Plus, Warsh will meet Trump halfway.

Yes, he will address the president’s obsession for lower short-term rates that the Fed controls, but Warsh knows the real interest rates that matter are those on the 10-year Treasury, to which consumer borrowing rates are pegged and which is controlled by bond traders who hate inflation. 

With that in mind, Warsh will thread the needle, lowering short-term rates while he downsizes the Fed’s massive balance sheet, essentially taking all that extra money out of the economy to appease bond traders as he sells the central bank’s large portfolio of debt retained during Powell’s money-printing spree. 

It will keep a lid on the 10-year yield and hopefully bring inflation closer to its target rate. 

It will be a balancing act, but if anyone can do it, it’s Kevin Warsh.

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Trump has criticized the Fed and its chair, Jerome Powell, for months for not lowering interest rates, and recently took aim at Powell over a costly renovation of the bank’s Washington headquarters.

“The Fed should be independent. The Fed is independent, but I, I also think that they’ve made a lot of mistakes,” Bessent told Reuters in an interview at a diner in suburban Washington.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent rejected the idea that markets were disturbed by the Trump administration’s actions. AP

Asked whether the administration’s efforts to remove Cook looked like an attempt to give Trump a chance to appoint a majority on the board of governors, Bessent said: “Well, or is it you’re having to do the Fed’s job for ’em?”

Independent central banks are widely seen as crucial to a stable global financial system.

Bessent said the makeup of the Fed board – with regional bank governors – meant the president could not “stack the board.”

Bessent rejected the idea that markets were disturbed by the Trump administration’s actions. “(The) S&P’s at a new high and bond yields are fine. So we haven’t seen anything yet,” he said.

Bessent said he believed that Cook should be removed or step down if the allegations against her are true, and noted that she had not denied them.

Cook and her supporters contend that the fraud allegations are a pretext to remove her so Trump could appoint an ally to the central bank who would promote his policy wishes. Cook is suing Trump and the Fed, saying Trump did not have the legal authority to remove her.

Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook is suing President Trump, saying he does not have the power to fire her. AP

Trump last week fired Cook, the first Black woman to serve on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, after the Trump-appointed head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, William Pulte, accused her of mortgage fraud. Pulte asked the Justice Department to investigate the claim. The department has not filed charges against her.

Fed Chair Jerome Powell has been criticized for months about the lack of interest rate cuts by the central bank and the costs of renovations at its headquarters. REUTERS

The Trump administration says Cook described separate properties in Michigan and Georgia as primary residences on mortgage applications in 2021, which could have given her preferential interest rates. Cook has said that even if the allegations were true, they would not be grounds for removal because the alleged conduct occurred before she was confirmed by the Senate and took office in 2022.

“I’ve been very surprised that the Fed has not done an independent review,” Bessent said. “She hasn’t said she didn’t do it. She’s just saying the president can’t fire her. There’s a big difference.”

Bessent said the Senate should act quickly to confirm Stephen Miran, chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, for a temporary post, replacing Adriana Kugler who resigned on Aug. 1.

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Trump has called for Cook’s head for allegedly committing mortgage fraud by signing documents that she had two primary residences.

We should let the courts decide that one.

But Cook’s notion that she’s standing up for the sanctity of the Fed should be taken with a grain of salt.

The Fed has long been distracted by side hustles to its “dual mandate” of price stability within the context of maximum employment. It’s far from an apolitical agency.

Even more, Cook’s own appointment by Joe Biden in 2022 is an example of how politics, particularly of the left-wing variety, has been infused into the Fed’s plumbing.

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In getting rid of Cook, you can make the case that Trump — in his own messy way — is righting the ship.

The markets may be signaling this — despite media talking heads and those of some Fed watchers exploding over Trump’s latest alleged apostasy.

The establishment commentariat is arguing that not being able to fire Fed Chair Jerome Powell or even Cook except for some on-the-job crime, aka cause — is why people keep buying our debt.

The nation’s central bank created by Congress to manage the money supply doesn’t report to the president.

It’s not subject to his political whims to juice economic growth at the expense of “King Dollar.”

OK, all good points.

But stocks and bond yields have barely budged.

The stated reasons in a recent Wall Street Journal piece: Traders believe Trump will appoint seasoned pros to fill the jobs of both Cook and his main Fed nemesis, Powell.

Big investors unfazed

Yes, but my sources provide a more prescient analysis of the market’s insouciance: Trump is merely putting his MAGA stamp on the independence charade.

Many big investors are unfazed by Trump’s power grab because for years the Fed has been straying from its mandate — constantly intervening in the economy by playing with the money supply when it isn’t needed and most recently becoming woke.

Lisa Cook’s nomination in 2022, subsequent confirmation by the then Democrat-controlled and woke-obsessed Senate is part of the proof.

Don’t believe me?

Here’s what Larry Summers, Bill Clinton’s former treasury secretary, former Harvard president and one of the most important economic minds on monetary policy said in 2021 about the Fed’s mission-creep:

“We have a generation of central bankers who are defining themselves by their ‘wokeness.’ They’re defining themselves by how socially concerned they are. They’re defining themselves how concerned they are about the environment . . . business ethics.”

In 2022, the Fed developed a “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Strategic Plan” to reflect the Federal Reserve Board’s “strategic initiative on diversity, equity, and inclusion, which is a shared responsibility of all Board employees.”

Now tell me exactly how DEI, which the Supreme Court says is discriminatory and common sense tells you erodes the nation’s meritocracy, helps the Fed figure out if it’s stoking inflation as it did just a few years ago during Joe Biden’s reign of error?

Or maybe I should be directing that question to Lisa Cook.

Her lawyer argued Friday before a federal judge that her firing by Trump is “unprecedented and illegal” in that it exceeds the president’s authority over an independent, nonpolitical agency.

Go back a few years to her messy confirmation battle and you will see how Cook is anything but apolitical.

Yes, she has a Ph.D. in econ, from Berkeley no less, and was a longtime academic.

She is the first African-American woman to serve as a Fed governor, which should be celebrated.

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But during the hearings we discovered that her areas of interest in economics, based on her publishing record, are dominated by stuff like how lynchings hindered the economic growth of black Americans.

There is a place for such research at the university — though you gotta ask yourself why we need an economist to explain something so fundamentally obvious.

Look into Cook’s résumé and you see this is an economist who seems more obsessed with being a social-justice warrior than weighing the vicissitudes of M2 and how it impacts price stability.

Presumed innocent

Again, I’m giving Cook the presumption of innocence on the mortgage inquiry.

For the record, I hate the lack of due process she received.

Instead of a simple referral to the DOJ to determine probable cause — cause is what Trump needs to boot her from the post — Bill Pulte, the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, has been announcing criminal referrals on the mortgage charges via social media.

Music to the ears of his social-media-obsessed boss, who announced Cook’s firing on Truth Social.

To date, Cool hasn’t denied the central charges that she purposely stated two primary residences to get a lower mortgage rate.

(Her lawyer has suggested she possibly erred.)

I also wonder if she would ­accord the same due process to someone who encroached on her woke-obsessed boundaries.

Good evidence says probably not.

Consider what she did in 2020, during the insane Summer of Love when Black Lives Matter riots spread across the country, demanding that the police be defunded.

A fellow academic at the University of Chicago, Harald Uhlig, also the editor at the influential Journal of Political Economy, criticized BLM and defunding.

She joined the online assault to get him fired.

(He was placed on leave by the publication and reinstated.)

Her rationale: “Free speech should have its limits,” adding that it shouldn’t be used to “spread ­hatred and violate the dignity of other people.”

Now do you really want someone like that helping run the ­nation’s central bank?

Maybe that’s why the markets don’t care about Trump’s power play.

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A little later that summer, the Democratic nominee agreed to do a photo-op in a battle tank with an army helmet perched awkwardly on his head.

GOP spin masters capitalized with the now infamous “tank ad” that lost Dukakis the election — and rightfully so.

President Trump touring the Federal Reserve’s headquarters with Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell on July 24, 2025. Getty Images

The public agreed that a pointy-headed dork who tried to pass himself off as a tough guy shouldn’t be anywhere near the US presidency.

That’s how I felt Thursday, watching the odd spectacle of Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell donning an ill-fitting helmet as he and President Trump toured the Fed’s new unfinished and overindulgent $2.5 billion “Taj Mahal” headquarters.

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Yes, Trump wants Powell out mainly because the Fed boss refuses to lower interest rates and juice the economy.

But let’s pause a moment to contemplate the construction-site fiasco. Trump chose to tour the facility because he wanted to make Powell look like a fool.

And it worked. Like Powell, Trump, too, was wearing a helmet, but the president looked pretty comfortable as his hulking frame towered over the central banker’s. Recall that Trump is a real estate developer.

Powell, meanwhile, looked like an economist who had just landed on Mars. He stood by nervously as Trump took some shots at the project’s well-publicized cost overruns.

Powell did manage to point out that the president had mistakenly added a few hundred million dollars to the actual total, but the actual total was outrageous nonetheless.

It’s easy to shrug off the presser as just another day in our Trumpian soap opera. The president is a master at working the room. Powell is not — he can barely do his job setting interest rates.

Yet as we debate Powell’s future, the scene serves as a suitable Dukakis-like metaphor, and an indicator that maybe Trump is right, and Powell needs to go sooner rather than later.

Independence is key

It takes a lot for me to say that. I don’t necessarily agree that we need to cut interest rates before we see the impact of Trump’s possibly inflation-inducing tariffs.

Plus, Fed independence from political forces is of fundamental importance. It’s the reason people buy our debt and finance our standard of living.

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The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 gives the central bank this large degree of autonomy because if it appears the chairman is a patsy of the president — lowering rates on his orders simply to stimulate growth — investors will see our debt as worthless paper prone to the rav­ages of inflation.

If we can’t sell our debt, we will get the mother of all financial crises, one that makes 2008 look like a cakewalk.

But defending Fed independence on Powell’s record is a loser’s game. Trump in 2017 during his first term appointed Powell and the two butted heads immediately.

Trump wanted lower rates while the economy — thanks to his tax policies — was roaring.

Powell initially didn’t give in and for good reason: The economy was too hot. But he ultimately caved to Trump and started slashing interest rates.

It’s reason No. 1 he should be fired: He’s far from independent.

The rate cuts left the Fed with fewer policy measures when it really needed to add liquidity during the COVID lockdowns.

Kept printing money

Here’s reason No. 2: During COVID, Powell used whatever dry powder he had in the Fed’s arsenal to print money like it grew on trees.

Even after businesses opened and the pandemic ended, he kept printing. Interest rates remained at zero or near zero well into the Biden presidency. (He was re-appointed by Sleepy Joe to a four-year term that ends next year.)

All this occurred as Biden spent trillions of dollars, exploding our debt and setting the stage for inflation. Powell then brushed off concerns that all this continued liquidity would do more harm than good.

He seemed to be working with Biden’s inept Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to spin the situation, calling the inflation “transitory.”

It wasn’t. Inflation hit 9.1% before Powell began to raise rates. It was one of the worst policy mistakes ever made by a Fed chair; fighting inflation is part of his dual mandate and the most important part because it’s a tax on working-class Americans who can’t speculate around it in the markets.

I know — I am arguing that Trump is right to get rid of Powell for the wrong reasons. Tariffs could cause higher prices and cutting rates might spike them further. And if Trump did ax Powell before his term ends, it could set up a constitutional battle royal.

But it’s hard to defend Powell’s long track record of cluelessness on monetary policy — or his cluelessness at the construction site. The sooner he goes, the better.

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“Words have power, which is a great tool. But words can be harder to reverse than the interest rate,” Daly said in remarks prepared for delivery to the Western Economic Association International annual conference that did not include any comments on the economic or monetary policy outlook. “They set expectations, which can be hard to change in the event the economy evolves differently than we expect.”

San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank President Mary Daly. Bloomberg via Getty Images

In 2021, the Fed said it would keep expanding its balance sheet and would not raise rates until inflation was on track to exceed its 2% goal for some time, an approach it felt was warranted given that inflation had under-run the 2% goal for years. Analysts and many Fed policymakers now say they believe the Fed was late to start raising rates to fight rising inflation in part because of this definitive guidance.

“The lesson for me from that period is that being definitive in highly uncertain times comes with a price,” Daly said. The central bank should, she said, be flexible and dynamic in how it communicates to the public.

The Fed is currently reevaluating its policy framework, and Daly said her remarks were not specifically about that effort. The Fed is also expected to redo its approach to communications, including potential changes to its so-called “dot plot” setting out Fed policymakers’ expected rate paths and used by markets as a guide to where the Fed expects rates to go.

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President Trump signed an executive order on Thursday to create a national stockpile of Bitcoin and other digital currencies, an audacious idea that has been widely criticized as a scheme to enrich crypto investors.

The basis of the stockpile will be a stash of Bitcoin, estimated to be worth as much as $17 billion, that the United States has seized in legal cases over the years.

The order also calls for federal agencies to develop strategies to buy more Bitcoin, the most popular digital currency, as long as those purchases do not generate extra costs for taxpayers.

“This Executive Order underscores President Trump’s commitment to making the U.S. the ‘crypto capital of the world,’” said David Sacks, the White House’s crypto and A.I. policy czar, in a post on social media. He said the United States would not sell any Bitcoin in the reserve, which he likened to “a digital Fort Knox.”

Since Mr. Trump took office in January, his administration has moved rapidly to elevate the crypto industry, a volatile sector that had battled with federal regulators for years. The Securities and Exchange Commission has dropped lawsuits against two of the biggest U.S. crypto companies and halted investigations into several others. And on Friday, Mr. Trump is scheduled to host crypto executives at the White House for a first-of-its-kind “crypto summit.”

Mr. Trump has a personal stake in the success of the crypto industry, creating conflicts of interests that have raised alarms with government ethics experts. Last year he started a business, World Liberty Financial, that offers a cryptocurrency called WLFI. Just days before his inauguration, he also began selling a so-called memecoin — a type of cryptocurrency tied to an online joke or a celebrity figure.

The notion of a U.S. crypto reserve gained traction last year as Mr. Trump embraced the industry on the campaign trail. Proponents argued that an investment in Bitcoin would help the government chip away at the $36 trillion national debt, and ensure that the United States remained dominant in a hypothetical future where the global economy runs on cryptocurrencies.

But skeptics said the plan seemed calculated to enrich crypto executives who already owned large amounts of Bitcoin by lifting its price. They argued that it was dangerous to link the nation’s economic future to a highly volatile asset.

At a conference in Nashville in July, Mr. Trump gave a speech to a crowd of Bitcoin enthusiasts and vowed to establish a national stockpile. He doubled down on that promise last weekend, posting on social media that he intended to create a reserve consisting of Bitcoin and other lesser-known cryptocurrencies, such as Solana, Cardano, Ether and XRP.

That plan drew criticism from some crypto executives, who argued that the only asset in a national reserve should be Bitcoin, the most valuable cryptocurrency on the market.

Under the order, the government will create a separate stockpile of digital assets other than Bitcoin. But it will include only coins that were acquired in criminal or civil seizures, and the government will not move to buy any cryptocurrencies except Bitcoin.

Crypto investors celebrated the announcement on social media, calling it a “historic day” and a “massive win” for the country.

“By holding Bitcoin and other digital assets for the long term, the White House is taking a future-forward approach,” Nathan McCauley, the chief executive of the crypto firm Anchorage Digital, said in a statement. “Expect this move to catalyze crypto adoption among more governments and institutions.”

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