Adam Posen graded Kevin Warsh's first Jackson Hole speech as chairman a B-minus, and expects the federal funds rate to be 75 to 100 basis points higher six months from now.
Most of the reaction to the speech read it as a hawkish signal and stopped there. Posen's reading is that the chairman listed every reason inflation will persist and then declined to say the sentence that follows from it, which leaves the Fed committed to a rate rise it has not promised.
"So things could get really messy because if they don't hike, then people start saying, was that because of Trump? Was the chair out over his skis, meaning ahead of the committee?"
Posen runs the Peterson Institute for International Economics, sat on the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee through the financial crisis, and was one of the four authors who made the academic case for inflation targeting alongside Ben Bernanke.
I listened to the full interview so you can skip it. 59 minutes of audio, 25 minutes of reading.
Here are the 11 takeaways that matter.
👤 Guest: Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics and a former external member of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee, 2009 to 2012
🎙️ Hosts: Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway, the Bloomberg journalists who present Odd Lots
📰 Published: 1 September 2026 · recorded 29 August 2026, at Jackson Hole
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Key Takeaways
The speech guided the Fed into a rate rise without ever announcing one Posen's worry is what markets conclude if the rise does not arrive
He expects Fed funds 75bps to 100bps higher within six months A hike in September or December, and he thinks December happens either way
Warsh is still keeping every option open until the last moment, and that is the real problem He wants inflation heading in the right direction at the right speed, and never says what the right speed is
The Fed chair, by convention rather than rule, never loses a vote
The international comparison does not flatter the Fed once you control for three things Imported energy, inherited inflation and fiscal looseness — the ECB and the Swiss National Bank did better
The communications task force under Mervyn King is where the surprise will come from, not the balance sheet one
The AI job apocalypse is not in the data, in either of the two jobs everyone expected to go first Hiring of coders and long-haul truckers is still growing
Economists moving in-house at AI companies lose the thing that made them worth listening to
1. A B-minus for Warsh
Weisenthal opened by asking what Posen made of the chairman's Jackson Hole speech, delivered the day before. Posen graded it.
Posen gave the speech a B-minus on its own merits, and a better mark for the mess it had to clean up. "You know, if you were grading it, it's a B-minus speech." He went on: "It's a B- speech by normal standards. It's much more positive because of the situation we were in." His reason was that the chairman had created "a huge amount of not just confusion" among sophisticated observers about what he really thinks — in the short term about whether he wants to raise rates, and over a longer horizon about the task forces and the rhetoric
The July press conference is the thing the speech had to repair. Posen said the chairman "totally messed things up" there, then pointed out that three of Warsh's four predecessors — Greenspan, Yellen and Powell — had major stumbles at an early press conference If the speech turns out in six months to have been a pivot point, Posen said, "Then this speech gets upgraded to a B plus and we're all happy."
The contrast he drew was with last year's symposium, which was about the attacks on the Fed and the fear for its independence and ended in a standing ovation for Powell. This year the chairman and his team deliberately wanted it to be normal, and Posen said it passed as normal.
Posen has been arguing for rate rises for months and read the speech as a guide toward one. "Now, as you know, and we talked about a few months ago, I've been urging them to hike for a while. I think inflation's real." A European central banker made the same point to him at breakfast that morning The fourth of the speech's four sections runs through the reasons to think inflation will not stay stable or will rise from here; the sentence that should have followed it was never spoken
What worries him is what happens if the rise never arrives. "So things could get really messy because if they don't hike, then people start saying, was that because of Trump? Was the chair out over his skis, meaning ahead of the committee?" Posen added that a chairman ahead of his committee is better than one behind it, and still worrying
Three housekeeping fixes he counted as improvements. The chairman named the target plainly — "And yesterday, he stated very clearly, core PCE 2%. That's the target." — said he does not think wage inflation is a good predictor of overall inflation, and said financial conditions matter. Posen called all three mainstream or defensible, and said they carry more weight than usual after two or three months of strange messaging
His main criticism was length. The second section, on the chairman's principles, should have gone: "I basically would have cut that section." He had expected the opposite — "I thought he was going to compete with Jay Powell from like four years ago for the shortest possible speech" — and said the principles raise more questions than they answer
2. The last-minute discretion
The thing Posen says worries him and a lot of former Fed and central bank officials is that the chairman is still trying to keep every option open until the last moment. "He's sort of reserving the right to make up his mind at the last minute, before every meeting, without pre-committing."
The tell sits at the very end of the speech, where Warsh said inflation has to be heading in the right direction and at the right speed. Alloway said the right speed sounded very subjective to her, and Posen agreed Without a stated speed, he said, the formulation is empty: "And right direction doesn't mean anything unless you're saying the target." Four years of above-target inflation is exactly the case where knowing the direction tells you nothing
He called it the most consistent thread running from Warsh's confirmation hearings through his first two press conferences and his remarks at the European Central Bank's Sintra conference to the Jackson Hole speech. Posen gave him credit for saying which indicators he prefers, and said nobody wants an inflexible chairman
The oddity is where the chairman comes from. He is out of the Hoover Institution, has been seen as a conservative and was mentored by the late John Taylor, and every central banker places themselves somewhere on the line between following a rule and using their own judgment
Posen's example of pure judgment is Alan Greenspan in 1999, who could get away with it because he was very good and because he had that much dominance over the committee — and it stored up a problem Posen calls "the weekend at Bernie's problem." "In 1999, you were worried if then already somewhat old Alan Greenspan had a heart attack on the Fed's tennis court, all the credibility went away because it was all about him."
That is the reason inflation targeting was pushed in the first place. Posen said he, Ben Bernanke, Rick Mishkin and Thomas Laubach pushed the idea, and that Bernanke as chairman consciously pushed accountability because he wanted the institution not to rest on one person. It is the part of the Warsh record Posen finds least discussed and most worrying
3. The chair never loses a vote
Alloway asked what the Fed chair's job actually is: to get everyone on his side and voting his way, or to synthesize a common position out of the committee. Posen said the Fed system does not specify, and that the answer moves with the chairman, the politics and the economy.
The two other central banks he knows work differently. The European Central Bank is meant to be consensus-driven and to get as many people on board as possible, partly because its members represent nations rather than districts. The Bank of England prioritizes discussion, which is the tradition Warsh invokes when he talks about a "family fight"
The Fed has given its chairman more power and deference than either, for 45 years. "The Fed has generally, on average, given more power and deference to the chair, certainly basically since Volcker, so the last 45 years."
The financial crisis concentrated it further, for good reasons. Bernanke started out trying to open the committee to more debate; the crisis ended that, and a US rule on how many committee members could meet before it became a public meeting left four people in the room — the New York Fed president, Bernanke, Warsh himself and Don Kohn. Posen said that was the right call at the time
The committee's constraint is a norm rather than a rule, and is stronger for it. "The ethic of the committee and the norm of the committee in the Fed system is you don't contradict the chair. You might dissent." Posen cited the former Fed governor Larry Meyer for the informal limit: "Only so many people dissent on the committee at any one meeting. And the chair never loses a vote." His proof is Volcker, who, once it was clear he was going to lose a vote, said the next meeting would be his last
4. Powell did get it wrong
Weisenthal put the chairman's own claim to Posen — that there have been 64 or 65 months of above-target inflation and that this is the Fed's fault, which makes it in large part his predecessor's fault. Alloway pointed out that inflation has been above target around the world and is not only a US problem.
Posen said the substance is fair and the tone around it was not. He called the nastier talk in the run-up to the appointment about cleaning house unnecessary, then endorsed the charge itself: "I do think it is entirely justified to say, Chair Powell with the deference and buy-in of the committee." His specific complaints: late to raise rates in 2022, early and in his view profoundly mistaken to cut several times last year, and behind the curve again now
The international comparison makes the Fed look worse, not better. "And the international comparison actually doesn't flatter the US." Control for three things — how dependent a country is on imported energy, what inflation it inherited, and how loose its fiscal policy is — and the Fed stands out more, not less "So the ECBs kept inflation down. The Swiss National Bank's kept inflation relatively down. Bank of England's almost the same as the Fed."
Part of the US gap is fiscal, and Posen assigned it to both parties. He said a large part of the reason the US has more inflation is that the Biden administration ran a fiscal expansion on taking office that probably was not necessary, that there has been no consolidation since, and that Trump's first year produced a long-term set of tax cuts He then turned the chairman's own framing back on him: "If you take that seriously, then all this fiscal laxity in discipline should be another reason to hike"
The forecasting error he says the Fed actually made was about the labor market. At Jackson Hole in previous years there was a drumbeat from Fed staff and members that the labor market could be really weak and inflation was coming down. Posen, Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute and Diane Swonk of KPMG were the ones saying they did not see it, and the collapse did not come
He kept the verdict proportionate. "Now, it's not he got it horrendously wrong. It's not he got it wrong for the wrong reasons."
5. What real interference is
Alloway asked where the bar for political interference sits, given that it could be anything from a president saying rates are artificially high to fiscal dominance that leaves the Fed unable to move.
A certain amount of complaining is part of the job and has sometimes been useful. "I mean, so the first thing to say is a certain amount of yelling at or scapegoating the Fed is part of the game." Under Volcker, Greenspan, Bernanke and Yellen a president could shout in public while the private message was, in Posen's words, "wink, wink, Fed, do your job"
What is outside the game is going after individuals. Posen listed the president calling the Fed chair an enemy of the state and the use of lawfare against Governor Cook and now Governor Powell. "I mean, that's outrageous and arguably criminal."
The real test comes when the Treasury wants help selling bonds. The answer a Fed governor or Reserve Bank president should give, in Posen's telling, is that the help is long-term rather than immediate: "And that means I don't do cheating and manipulation now. I'm here to help you sell the bonds. You're preserving the long-term credibility of U.S. Debt."
The second unprecedented thing is structural rather than rhetorical. Threats, loudest last year, to strip Reserve Bank presidents of their votes or turn them over quickly for political appointees instead of leaving the staggered terms alone, plus talk of changing the Fed's mandate and of interfering with its budget
He ranked the two. "So the big one, economically speaking, is the caving in in the face of fiscal pressure." Politicizing who is appointed and when is almost as big, and is the route to the first one
6. The family fight he doubts
Weisenthal said the phrase "family fight" sounds good and the chairman has now used it in both of his press conferences, and asked whether the Powell years were a room where real debate did not happen. He noted that when he asked the Chicago Fed president Austan Goolsbee at the same conference last year why dissents are rare, one answer was that Powell was good at building consensus.
Posen restated the claim and then rejected it in five words. "I think Kevin Warsh is saying what you just said, Joe, that I am okay with more dissent and more debate. I don't believe him."
He agreed with the diagnosis anyway. "He's right that debate had gotten too little, and it's healthy to have debate."
His explanation is not that Powell suppressed dissent. Powell was very good inside the building, but Posen said he also, first under COVID and then while the Fed was under open attack from Trump, deliberately set the bar for dissenting high so the committee would not show division to its attackers
Posen has backed the same move himself. On the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee from 2009 to 2012, Governor Mervyn King asked for a truce once the quantitative easing vote had been taken — "But once we've done it, can we have a moratorium on people asking whether or not quantitative easing works or not for a while?" — and Posen said he totally supported it, because it was an emergency
The problem is that a high bar feeds on itself. "So if you've gone 12 meetings, 15 meetings without anybody dissenting, the bar psychologically becomes higher for someone to dissent." Posen said he hopes he is wrong about the chairman's sincerity, and that on the substance the Fed did go through a period with too little dissent
7. King's committee may shock
Alloway noted that King is heading the new task force on Fed communications and asked what problem Warsh and King are trying to solve. Posen disclosed first: he worked under King at the Bank of England, and Peter Fisher, the former New York Fed and Treasury official, sits on the Peterson Institute's board.
He expects the surprise to come from the communications task force, not the balance sheet one. "I think this is the committee that has the biggest chance of a surprise to being radical." The balance-sheet group — Raghuram Rajan, Jeremy Stein and Karen Dynan, the last a colleague of his — will in his guess produce more sober, practical and smaller-scale recommendations than people expect
King wrote the playbook he has since turned against. He led the inflation-targeting movement, and when sterling fell out of the exchange rate mechanism in 1992 he was the one who acted, as the Bank's chief economist, to give the UK an anchor. He was also the parent of the fan charts, the colored probability spreads around a forecast, which Posen liked and says almost nobody else did
The point of all of it was transparency and accountability: publish the forecast, say explicitly how likely each outcome is, commit to specific releases at specific times so there is a track record, and make the committee admit when it changes its mind
King's recent position is close to the chairman's. Too much noise, central banks are bad at forecasting, and markets become too dependent on the central bank's stated future plans, which both feeds moral hazard and gives the central bank back less information
The prescription is higher yields and more volatility around them, deliberately. "It should be higher than it had been because that forces markets to take risk more seriously and price things better." Fewer bubbles and better-priced risk follow, on that view — which Posen marked as not his own: "This is their point of view, not mine."
Fisher holds both positions too, after the New York Fed, the Treasury and senior roles at BlackRock including head of Asia: skeptical about central banks' ability to forecast, and worried that their certainty causes bubbles and clouds the signal coming back from markets
Posen credited the chairman with backing off the strongest version of it. "So even though Chair Warsh in the speech here at Jackson Hole backed off a little bit of some of the more extreme statements of that, he admitted that he had this thing about a hall of mirrors image in the speech, which is a way of admitting that the market isn't always right." The earlier formulation he had no time for at all: "Much better than play the ball, not the referee, which was garbage."
8. Economists go in-house
Weisenthal asked how Posen feels about the number of social scientists leaving universities and think tanks for one of two very large AI companies.
He said it is not unprecedented. Amazon and Google hired economists during the internet boom, partly for internal work such as pricing and auction design and partly to talk about policy and argue for the regulation they wanted. Posen named Hal Varian, who became Google's first chief economist and hired a group of people around him, and said that arrangement was normal and fine
What has changed is the scale of the pull, which he put an order of magnitude higher. "Oh my God, I can make real money. Oh my God, that's where the cool people are. Oh my God, I can be part of changing the world. So it's very seductive." His other precedent is the genetic-engineering boom, when Nobel winners and graduate students left academic jobs for startups such as Genentech
He thinks the underlying case is real, not a rationalization. The claim that this is "the most transformative technology of a century" and could do enormous good is, in his word, legit, even if it is overhyped and takes longer than promised
The difference this time is that the hiring is explicitly about policy. Posen said Anthropic's hiring is, by the company's own account, largely about working out what the right policies are to make the AI transition work, and that the economists he knows who went there sincerely believe that
The cost is that nobody weighs their arguments the same way afterwards. "People understandably discount their views once they're in-house and getting money." A world-class expert on the economics of innovation who starts saying the technology will create three times as many jobs as it destroys may believe it, and will be discounted anyway The other cost is structural: "You're losing your independent voice." A company is a hierarchy, and what you work on — and do not work on — is no longer only your choice
His answer for institutions like his own is to pay less and say so. "And I think there's a role for this academic colleague of mine, the people at the Peterson Institute and like institutes to, I hope, be willing to settle for the low six-figure salaries, which are still pretty darn good, and influence policy without going on staff." He mentioned one noted academic, a techno-optimist himself, who has been pursued by all of these firms and turned them down
9. Messy jobs beat the models
Alloway asked whether there is evidence of AI showing up in the labor market or in productivity here and now. Posen said the productivity evidence is much further along than the labor-market evidence.
In the two jobs everyone expected to go first, hiring is still growing. "So the number of hires, even of coders, you know, if you had to pick the two jobs where you most thought they're toast, would be long haul truckers and coders, lower level coders. And we're just not seeing it. Job growth continues in those industries." He pointed at the work of Jed Kolko, chief economist at the Commerce Department under Biden and before that at Indeed, and at Martin Chorzempa, both at Peterson, and named Adam Ozimek at the Economic Innovation Group as doing the same kind of work and landing in the same place, that the displacement may come yet but has not happened
Two explanations for the absence, both from outside his own team. Erik Brynjolfsson at Stanford on the delay: "And so Brynjolfsson has spoken about a J-curve, that it takes time for this to happen." And Luis Garicano at the London School of Economics on what he calls messy jobs
The transition period is a few years, not one and not ten. "So there's a period there, we don't know if it's one year, five years, it's probably less than 10 years, it's probably closer to five." During it, Posen said, the efficient arrangement is a human and the AI working together while the businesses reorganize around the technology and robotics gets integrated
The messy-jobs argument is that exposure studies mislead. Almost every job, arguably including long-haul trucking, carries far more specific knowledge and sits in far more relationships than a task list captures, so the consulting-firm and international-institution lists of most-exposed sectors are probably misleading His historical version: "Again, in the Industrial Revolution in 19th century England, the analog to the long-haul truck driver was the skilled artisan who did weaving." Those weavers really were replaced; outside that narrow job description the displacement went nothing like the way a pre-industrial study would have predicted
Alloway's example was the live piano player, which she credited to Ozimek: people still get hired to play the piano at parties, because the player reads the mood of the room and picks something uptempo. Posen's version came from an off-the-record meeting where a senior figure from the AI industry was asked why the job apocalypse had not happened. "Well, you know, it turns out people really like dealing with humans and don't always want to deal with machines."
Where he thinks displacement will show up first. "Anyway, so the job stuff, it's probably coming. If it is coming, it is showing up in the lack of hiring of younger people."
He is just short of pessimistic on the productivity gains so far. He dates any AI boost to growth only to the last year and a half, and says the post-COVID reshuffling and redefinition of jobs is a competing explanation for weak hiring — a throwaway line in the chairman's speech that he agrees with On the loudest forecasts: "As my grandmother used to say, we should be so lucky. But we ain't there yet."
10. The 0.3% GDP nobody saw
Weisenthal raised the question of whether the chips Nvidia designs in the US and has manufactured abroad, largely in Taiwan, are being captured properly in the data.
The reported gap is 0.3% of GDP, and Posen said it changes nothing for policy. "And there was this report out that we should have added 0.3% to GDP." He called it real money, then: "The Fed doesn't target GDP, so it doesn't really imply anything about, oh, we would have done something different monetary policy-wise."
It matters for the productivity question instead. "If this 0.3% say a year was overlooked and it is directly attributable to the AI sector, then that tells a different story about productivity." Martin Chorzempa and Joe Gagnon, a former Fed official, are both working on it at Peterson
GDP is mostly settled and has edges that are not. "It is much more science than art," Posen said, with gross domestic income and final demand meant to work as checks on each other, and moving together over time
The first edge is allocation. When a US company using US technology produces abroad, working out how much of the output is domestic and how much is an import gets messed up, which is the old value-added argument, and long supply chains make it harder
The second is whether market value captures the value at all. The standard responses are that market value is what economists are supposed to measure, and that hedonic indexing adjusts for quality — mostly on the inflation side rather than the growth side
His illustration was a plane ticket. "You or I can go in and type, get me the cheapest possible ticket to Jackson Hole. I don't want to have to think about it, but don't seat me next to a baby." The time saved and the aggravation avoided do not show up in GDP
The gains arrive when the users change, not when the chipmakers do. Intel and Texas Instruments following Moore's Law in the 1990s showed up a bit in GDP, but Posen said the real change came later: "But the gains really happened when McDonald's and Walmart and UPS and everybody transformed their businesses to take advantage of it."
Nvidia's own economics are unaffected either way. Its bottom line does not move with the accounting, the engineers designing the chips in the US are paid the same, and the money coming in still splits between shareholders, investment and workers
11. He says the Fed will hike
Weisenthal closed on the inflation outlook, going back to the paper Posen published before his last appearance forecasting 4% inflation by year end. Posen said that was 4% on PCE and a little higher on CPI; Alloway noted CPI got over 4% earlier in the year, which surprised a lot of people.
The joint piece with Peter Orszag of Lazard rested on four things being looser than the Fed believed: a more resilient US labor market, more available credit, financial conditions that were not as tight as the Fed thought, and fiscal policy a little looser than they had assumed The fifth was momentum, from a Fed that had gone years without bringing inflation down: "And the Fed, having not brought down inflation for 64 months or whatever it was then, 55 months, did have some momentum built up." He also argued there was a J-curve in the effect of tariffs and anti-migration policy, because businesses take time to decide and implement
The real claim was about the next shock, not the level. "But anyway, the big point was, whenever the next inflation shock comes, it's gonna go worse." He did not claim to have predicted which one: "I had no idea that the President of the United States would bomb Iran," or that disruption in the Strait of Hormuz would carry inflationary effects
A softer month or two would not change his view. Inflation may trickle down a tenth or two on energy, but the persistence is in core services rather than imported goods, and the three-, six- and 12-month moving averages the chairman cited in the speech are rising — in the high threes rather than at four, but rising
The call is a hike, and then another one. "So my view is the Fed is going to hike. If they don't hike in September, they're certainly going to hike in December. I expect if they hike in September, they're still going to hike in December."
The number he put on it. "And so six months from now, Fed funds will be 75 pips or 100 pips higher than it is now." Posen used pips for basis points, so that is a rise of three quarters of a point to a full point
And the range until then. "But until then, we're going to be in this three and a half to four and a half range with some upside risk."
Bonus Insights
Weisenthal's own reading of the speech was hawkish with a hyphen in it. "I found it to be hawk-ish, which is like with a dash between the hawk and the ish" — clear that there is a plan to fight inflation and work to do, because the chairman said inflation is going in the wrong direction and policy has been insufficiently restrictive, but not the 2022 Powell posture of an aggressive campaign announced in advance
Alloway's objection to that reading is that the chairman could have said the same things at the July meeting and chose not to raise rates because he wanted more information — and more information is always arriving, as are more shocks, so what the actual threshold is remains unclear
Powell's legacy came up after the interview ended. Weisenthal pointed out that Arthur Burns is the chair people remember as having had a bad tenure, while Bernanke is remembered fondly despite presiding over a financial crisis and years of high unemployment. "It doesn't seem like from a reputational perspective, high unemployment under your watch gets sort of penalized the same degree as high inflation. People really seem to hate inflation."
Alloway's roofing story is the messy-jobs argument in miniature. She and her husband asked ChatGPT and watched YouTube videos on how to roof an outdoor shed, were told to use a particular product to stick the shingles down, and found out afterwards that it only works above 60 degrees Fahrenheit. "And the bots and the YouTube videos were incapable of spotting that we were in fact in Connecticut versus Florida."
Posen on the introduction the hosts gave him, which included the observation that he is not afraid to utter the words fiscal dominance: "After that intro, thank you so much. You have to really throw some fastballs. I don't know whether it's hype or warning."
Posen's bottom line is that the chairman's speech has set the Fed up for a rate rise it never committed to, and that failing to deliver one would leave the market asking whether the decision belonged to the committee or to the president.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
Peterson Institute for International Economics (Posen's institute; he names Martin Chorzempa, Jed Kolko, Joe Gagnon and Karen Dynan as colleagues, and says Peter Fisher sits on its board)
Bank of England (Where Posen served on the Monetary Policy Committee from 2009 to 2012; the model of a committee that prioritizes debate, and where Mervyn King asked for a moratorium on relitigating quantitative easing)
European Central Bank and the Swiss National Bank (The consensus-driven alternative to the Fed's model, and the two central banks Posen says kept inflation down while the Fed did not)
Lazard (Peter Orszag's firm; Posen's inflation piece was written jointly with him)
Anthropic (Where Peterson affiliate Anton Korinek went on leave this year, and whose economist hiring Posen says is by the company's own account about AI transition policy)
Google and Amazon (The internet-boom precedent for economists going in-house; Hal Varian became Google's first chief economist and Amazon's economists worked on the pricing model)
Genentech (Posen's other precedent — the genetic-engineering boom that pulled Nobel winners and graduate students out of academia into startups)
Economic Innovation Group (Adam Ozimek's think tank; Posen says Ozimek is doing great work on whether AI is displacing jobs and comes down on not yet)
American Enterprise Institute and KPMG (Michael Strain and Diane Swonk, who Posen says were saying with him that the labor market would not collapse while the Fed was saying it would)
BlackRock (Where Peter Fisher was head of Asia and held other senior roles after the New York Fed and the Treasury)
Indeed (Where Jed Kolko worked before becoming chief economist at the Commerce Department)
Nvidia (The company at the center of the GDP mismeasurement question; Posen says its bottom line does not change whichever way the output is allocated)
ChatGPT (What Alloway and her husband used to work out how to roof a shed, and which missed that they were in New England)
Intel and Texas Instruments (Chip makers following Moore's Law in the 1990s — visible in GDP, but not where the productivity gains landed)
McDonald's, Walmart and UPS (Where those gains did land, once the businesses reorganized around the technology)
Grand Theft Auto VI (The hosts recalled a Goldman Sachs note arguing productivity was mismeasured because a new edition's graphics were so much better than the last, and suggested having the author back for this one)
Books & Resources Mentioned
In Our Time – Kevin Warsh (The 28 August Jackson Hole keynote Posen grades, quotes and criticizes through the first half of the interview)
Inflation Targeting: Lessons from the International Experience – Ben Bernanke, Thomas Laubach, Frederic Mishkin and Adam Posen (The book Posen calls "our book," which he says cited Mervyn King's transparency work at the Bank of England heavily)
The Risk of Higher U.S. Inflation in 2026 – Adam Posen and Peter Orszag (The joint piece behind the 4% call Alloway raises at the end)
The Fed's task forces (The Federal Reserve's own announcement of the review groups, including the communications task force under Mervyn King and the balance-sheet group of Raghuram Rajan, Jeremy Stein and Karen Dynan)
The Productivity J-Curve – Erik Brynjolfsson (The delay argument Posen cites for why AI job displacement has not appeared yet)
Messy jobs – Luis Garicano (Where the London School of Economics economist sets out the idea Alloway says she finds compelling)
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