From the moment Kevin M. Warsh stepped to the lectern for his first news conference as chairman of the Federal Reserve on Wednesday, he sounded less like the head of the central bank and more like a politician.
Fresh off presiding over his initial policy meeting as the leader of the world’s most powerful central bank, Mr. Warsh took on the manner and appearance of an elected official smooth-talking his way through a town hall forum.
He received questions with knowing smiles. He elicited laughs. He gave long answers that amounted to neither a yes nor a no. And he filled his answers with the kind of jargon that seemed more suited for a corporate boardroom than a Fed news conference.
He talked about “first principles” and trumpeted the brevity of Wednesday’s Fed policy statement. He spoke of “alternative frameworks” and the Fed’s “remit.”
“Change isn’t easy,” he said. “Change is filled with risk.” He conveyed his hope that “we can put some points on the board.”
At one point, he said artificial intelligence was “shorthand perhaps for American ingenuity” — an idiom that would not have been out of place in a stump speech.
He even had a ready catchphrase.
“We have a task force for that,” he said in response to a question about A.I., referring to groups that he said he was creating to study topics including the Fed’s communications and data sources.
Could the chairman offer his views on how much interest rates were weighing on the economy? “We have a task force on that, too.”
Still, the fact that Mr. Warsh held a news conference was notable.
He has vowed “regime change” at the Fed, extending to the way the central bank communicates. He has suggested that its policymakers talk too much and has criticized the bank’s tradition of indicating where it sees interest rates heading.
At his Senate confirmation hearing in April, Mr. Warsh did not commit to holding news conferences after every policy meeting, though he stopped short of arguing for a reduction. Fed chairs have held scheduled news conferences after policy meetings since 2011.
“Truth-seeking is more important than repetition,” Mr. Warsh said at his hearing. “If one has a press conference, one wants to deliver some important news.”
Mr. Warsh, who was a Fed governor from 2006 to 2011, did provide some news on Wednesday. He said he was the Fed official who did not submit a set of projections for the “dot plot,” which tracks what policymakers believe will happen to borrowing costs in the future. He vowed that the Fed would focus on delivering “price stability.” He announced the formation of his task forces.
Many detractors had feared that Mr. Warsh would be President Trump’s “sock puppet,” there to do the president’s bidding and lower interest rates on demand. That was not a takeaway on Wednesday.
Instead, it was Mr. Warsh’s jocular jujitsu that was perhaps more striking.
It was a stark deviation from his immediate predecessor, Jerome H. Powell, who as Fed chair was known for his plain-spoken communication. During one of his first news conferences, in 2018, Mr. Powell promised to provide a “plain-English summary of how the economy is doing, what my colleagues and I at the Federal Reserve are trying to do, and why.”
Mr. Warsh seemed to delight in obfuscation.
He declined to state what he thought should happen with interest rates, or how exactly the Fed would bring down inflation, which has remained well above the Fed’s 2 percent target for five years. In response to a question about renovations at the Fed’s headquarters, which Mr. Trump has vociferously attacked and which led to a criminal investigation of Mr. Powell, Mr. Warsh said little beyond a general need for the Fed to be “good stewards of taxpayer money.”
Fielding a question from a reporter about how patient he believed the Fed could be on inflation, Mr. Warsh appeared to stifle a chuckle. “Quite a bit there,” he allowed. “Let me try to break that into pieces.”
“I’m glad they’re in the practice of giving you two questions, because my answer to your first question was to be very curt,” he retorted after another query. “I’ve got nothing more to say than the statement itself.”
“I don’t want to prejudge the outcome,” he said again and again.
His demeanor struck some Fed watchers as evasive, though there were also concessions that he seemed comfortable for a first-timer.
“It was not a terse press conference,” said Christian Hoffmann, head of fixed income at Thornburg Investment Management. “I think he very much likes communication on his own terms.”
And Mr. Trump, for now, seemed to like what he saw.
Speaking to reporters after Mr. Warsh’s news conference, Mr. Trump was lukewarm on the Fed’s decision to hold interest rates steady. But he was more generous toward his new Fed chairman.
“We have a very good guy over there now,” Mr. Trump said, “so I’m guided by what he wants to do.”
Lydia DePillis contributed reporting.
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