Donald Trump picks Kevin Warsh to succeed Jerome Powell as Federal Reserve chair

US President Donald Trump on Friday nominated long-time confidant Kevin Warsh as the successor to Federal Reserve chief Jerome Powell.

Trump announced the pick in a post on his Truth Social platform, praising Warsh’s experience in government, academia and finance, and predicting he would become “one of the GREAT Fed Chairmen, maybe the best.”

The nomination follows a White House meeting Thursday between Trump and Warsh and caps weeks of speculation over who would lead the Federal Reserve after Powell’s term ends in mid-May.

The US President told reporters Thursday night that his choice would be announced the next morning and would be “somebody that could have been there a few years ago,” an apparent reference to Warsh, whom Trump considered for the role during his first term before ultimately selecting Powell.

Trump later said he regretted that decision as Powell resisted repeated calls from the White House to cut interest rates more aggressively.

This time, Trump has made support for lower rates an explicit criterion for the job.

Warsh is a partner at Duquesne Family Office, the firm that manages the fortune of investor Stanley Druckenmiller, and previously worked in mergers and acquisitions at Morgan Stanley.

He has also held academic posts at Stanford and the Hoover Institution and authored an independent report on monetary policy reforms for the Bank of England.

Warsh began his career in 1995 in mergers and acquisitions at Morgan Stanley, advising companies across manufacturing, basic materials, professional services and technology, and helping structure capital markets and financing transactions.

In 2002, he left Wall Street to join the administration of George W. Bush, serving as special assistant to the president for economic policy and executive secretary of the White House National Economic Council. He advised senior officials on capital markets, banking, securities and insurance issues and served on the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets.

During his earlier Fed tenure, Warsh was a close adviser to then-Chair Ben Bernanke and served as the central bank’s chief liaison to Wall Street during the 2008 financial crisis. Warsh had then objected to Fed’s low-interest rate policies.

More recently, however, he has backed Trump’s calls for steep rate cuts, while also faulting the Fed for underestimating how productivity gains driven by artificial intelligence could help contain inflation.