Everyone's reading Powell's last FOMC as a story about rates or the Warsh transition.That's the surface story.The deeper one. Jerome Powell is the last Fed Chair appointed under the old rules. The next era opens with a White House that publicly threatened to fire him, a DOJ that opened a criminal probe into him, and a successor who told the Senate the Fed needs a "different, new inflation framework."Powell's real legacy isn't the interest rate https://t.co/bZ0ITXaOdF's that he protected the institution's independence from a President who openly tried to break it.The numbers tell you what kind of Fed Warsh inherits.
▪️ Federal funds rate: 3.50–3.75%, frozen for 3 consecutive meetings
▪️ March CPI: 3.3%, with gasoline up 21.2% in a single month from the Iran war
▪️ Core PCE 2026 projection: revised up to 2.7% from 2.4%
▪️ Fed balance sheet: $6.7 trillion, which Warsh has pledged to shrink faster
▪️ Powell took over in 2018 with rates at 1.5% and inflation at 2%Compare what Powell inherited from Yellen to what Warsh inherits from Powell.Yellen handed Powell a soft landing in progress.Powell hands Warsh a stagflation puzzle no living Fed Chair has solved.Stuck inflation. Weakening labor market. An oil shock that won't end. A balance sheet that can't shrink fast without breaking something.And the policy lever Warsh wants to pull, faster QT instead of rate cuts, was last tried at this scale in the https://t.co/oTXUjt0ho5 didn't go well.But the bigger story sits https://t.co/TyzrzHfJRi the past 60 days alone:
▪️ UAE quit OPEC after 59 years
▪️ Iran sells oil for yuan and crypto outside the dollar system
▪️ Pakistan opened legal land routes to Iran to bypass the US Navy
▪️ A US President pressured a Fed Chair to resign, and opened a criminal probe to do itEach of these is a small crack in the post-1971 dollar order.Together they're not random.Powell's last press conference isn't really about the next rate https://t.co/4uzstDyjJG's the closing chapter of a Fed that markets trusted to be independent.The next chapter is being written by people who don't think it should be.
Follow @JoeLowson for the structural shifts that move under the headline numbers.