Federal Reserve Unveils Leadership and Objectives of Five Task Forces

By Jessica Coacci

The Federal Reserve released information on the objectives and leadership of a group of task forces previously announced by new Chairman Kevin Warsh to evaluate core functions at the central bank.

The task forces will operate independently with support from Fed staff and have "a mandate to follow the evidence, provide candid feedback, and produce rigorous findings for the Federal Open Market Committee," the central bank said Thursday.

The communications task force is set to review how the Fed conveys policy deliberations and decisions amid uncertainty. Members of the communications task force include Mervyn King, former governor of the Bank of England, and Arminio Fraga, the former president of Brazil's central bank. Also on the task force is Peter R. Fisher, a professor at the University of Washington's Foster School of Business.

A balance sheet policy task force will examine the costs, benefits, and institutional implications of the Fed's current balance-sheet regime, the statement said. Harvard University professors Karen Dynan and Jeremy Stein--who is also a former Fed Board governor--will serve on this task force, as well as Raghuram Rajan, the former governor of the Reserve Bank of India and a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

The data task force--expected to improve the quality and timeliness of real economic signals that inform the Fed's policy judgments--will be led by Raj Chetty, a Harvard University economics professor; Walmart's former CEO, Doug McMillon; and Kevin Murphy, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago.

The productivity and jobs task will assess the economic effects of new general-purpose technologies, such as artificial intelligence, to inform the central bank's policy judgments, the Fed said. Marc Andreessen, cofounder and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz; Stanford University economics professor Charles I. Jones, who is currently on leave at Anthropic; and Asha Sharma, the CEO of Microsoft's XBOX unit, were named to lead this group.

The inflation frameworks group will revisit how the Fed understands and responds to the drivers of inflation. The named leaders are Harvard University economics professor Greg Mankiw, the former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers; Nobel laureate Thomas Sargent, a professor of economics at New York University; and William White, a former economic adviser for the Bank for International Settlements.

The Fed said that the task forces would be "co-led by external advisers-accomplished economists, business leaders, and former central bank practitioners-with deep expertise in their fields."

Write to Jessica Coacci at jessica.coacci@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

July 09, 2026 16:09 ET (20:09 GMT)