The Weekly Wrap: Free Kevin Warsh!
Welcome back to Friday! This is the Breitbart Business Digest weekly news wrap, where we declare our investigation of the events of the past seven days is closed while noting that we will not hesitate to restart our probe if the facts warrant.
Kevin Warsh finally got a confirmation hearing this week, but until Friday, it appeared that his nomination might be stuck between the unmovable object called Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) and the irresistible force of Jeanine Pirro. We still do not definitively know when Warsh’s nomination will move forward, but a floor vote in the Senate prior to May 15—when the current chair’s term expires—is no longer out of the question.
The Powell Pirouette
A day after publicly announcing that her investigation into the cost overruns for the renovation of the Fed’s headquarters will continue, U.S. Attorney General for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro said that she had instructed her office to close the investigation. Congratulations to Senator Tillis whose pressure campaign succeeded in the triumph of politics over the impartial administration of justice.
Tillis sits on the Senate Banking Committee, which must approve Kevin Warsh’s nomination to head the Fed before it can be advanced for a full Senate vote. The committee has 13 Republicans and 11 Democrats. So, the defection of a single Republican vote would effectively scuttle the nomination. Tillis has said for months that although he supports the nomination, he would not vote to move it forward so long as the Justice Department was investigating Powell and the Fed.
Current Fed chairman Jerome Powell has said that he would not leave the Fed unless the investigation is transparently and finally brought to an end. He has another year-and-a-half in his term as Fed governor after his chairmanship expires in May, so he could try to stick around as a kind of shadow-chairman. That would likely damage the institution of the Fed and tempt President Trump to remove him from his seat. The Supreme Court, you’ll recall, is still considering the case arising from President Trump’s attempt to remove Fed Governor Lisa Cook, suggesting that the extent of the president’s authority to remove a Fed governor for cause is a more difficult legal question than many of Trump’s critics thought. Ironically, the grounds for Powell’s removal could be his refusal to cooperate with Pirro’s investigation.
So, is Warsh’s nomination in the clear? That’s still not certain. In her post on X, Pirro said she would “not hesitate to restart a criminal investigation should the facts warrant doing so.” That’s not quite the final and decisive end of the investigation that Tillis and Powell have demanded.
Median Cool and Trimmed
Our hearts were aflutter this week during the Warsh confirmation hearing when the once-governor-and-future-chairman said that he would have the Fed investigate the usefulness of watching alternative measures of inflation, such as the trimmed mean PCE inflation metric compiled by the Dallas Fed and the median inflation barometer put out by the Cleveland Fed. We’ve long advanced the lonely argument that these are better guides to underlying inflationary pressures than the headline personal consumption expenditure price index or the core index. And they are certainly much better than the ad hoc indexes analysts like to cite to prove that inflation is really doing whatever they think it should be doing.
Trimmed mean inflation mechanically lops off the highest and the lowest price changes. This helps avoid distortions created by big jumps in product prices that are not necessarily reflective of the overall price level. Median inflation accomplishes the same thing by simply looking to the middle of the index. Neither necessarily excludes food and fuel, the inelastically-demanded household staples that the core index overlooks.
Warsh also thinks the Fed has been communicating too much. The Summary of Economic Projections and all the Fed’s “forward guidance” has undermined the credibility of the Fed, in part because it so often turns out to be wrong. It would be better for the Fed to opine a bit less and focus more on finding accurate measures of the state of the economy.
Warsh’s Critics Should Put a Sock in It
Elizabeth Warren, the formerly credible academic turned raging leftist Senator from Massachusetts, accused Warsh of being a “sock puppet” for President Trump. What she means is that she thinks Warsh will not operate the Fed independently but will adopt whatever monetary policy Trump wants. Others have echoed this criticism, saying Warsh’s record reflects a “partisan flexibility” when it comes to monetary policy, claiming that he’s hawkish when Democrat’s occupy the White House and dovish when Republicans do.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) questions Kevin Warsh during his Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee confirmation hearing on April 21, 2026. (Tom Williams/Getty Images)
That’s a view that looks quite foolish in the face of Warsh’s record. Warsh was a hawk in the lead up to the financial crisis crescendo in 2008—when George W. Bush was in the White House. He pivoted toward a more dovish position as the financial sector imploded and the economy quaked. Later, when the Fed insisted on launching QE after QE, he became more hawkish, explaining that the later versions of the Fed’s large-scale asset purchases were pushing up the prices of financial assets but doing little to help most Americans. That’s hardly a partisan view at all—many left-wing and right-wing critics of the Fed agree.
During the woeful Biden years, Warsh correctly argued that the Fed waited too long to pull back its pandemic-era accommodative monetary policy. That history-making mistake by Powell’s Fed contributed to the worst inflation in 40 years—leaving price stability still out of reach a half decade later. As Warsh says, “inflation is a choice,” and the Fed chose to support Biden’s spending spree instead of preventing inflation from getting out of hand.
To paraphrase the famous line: Warsh changes his view of monetary policy when the facts change. What do you do, Liz?
Game On!
Consumer sentiment is at an all time low, according to the University of Michigan. But consumers sure aren’t acting like they are in dire straits.
Take Hasbro. This week, shares of the toymaker jumped by more than six percent after the company provided a positive first-quarter revenue guidance and reiterated its 2026 outlook. It’s Wizards of the Coast unit—which publishes the Magic: The Gathering card game and Dungeons & Dragons—is seen by analysts as providing a lot of upside potential. Earnings per share are expected to rise by a around 3.5 percent this year and nearly 10 percent next year.
Almost everything Hasbro makes is a discretionary purchase by American consumers. If consumers were as depressed as the University of Michigan’s survey says, we would expect Hasbro’s sales and profits to tumble. But Americans are still buying games and toys. This is even more remarkable because of the lack of major Hollywood blockbusters that often support toy sales.
I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream for Ice Cream!
Happy birthday to Sheila Bair, the former chair of the FDIC and recently the author of How Not to Lose a Million Dollars, a book about finance for kids.
Bair recently pointed out in an email that April 30 marks the anniversary of the debut of the ice cream cone. The occasion was the opening day of the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. The fair kicked off a seven-month extravaganza that drew almost 20 million people from around the world. It was at the fairgrounds, a 1,500 acre campus in Forest Park, that Americans were introduced to the ice cream cone.
A pavilion sells refreshments at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, Missouri. (Philipp Kester/ullstein bild via Getty Images)
The story goes that Ernest A. Hamwi, a Syrian concessionaire at the fair, was selling crisp waffle-like pastries called zalabis. In the next booth over, a vendor was hawking ice cream. When the ice cream scooper ran out of dishes, Hamwi rolled one of his zalabis into a cone to serve the product in. It was a big hit!
So big, in fact, that many others have claimed credit for the idea, including a few who were also vendors at the 1904 World’s Fair. The identity of the ice cream seller is also disputed. And some have pointed out that in 1902, Italian entrepreneur Antonio Valvona patented a machine for baking biscuit cups for ice cream, and in 1903, Italo Marchiony filed a U.S. patent for an apparatus to mold edible ice cream cup. But those were flat-bottomed confections rather than pointy cones, so we’re still crediting Hamwi.
Hamwi went on to run a number of cone-making companies, including a few he founded. He also continued to innovate ways to serve ice cream, applying for a patent for a new kind of ice cream cup shortly before his death in 1943. But, like many founders and inventors, he did not become the dominant conical concessionaire. That distinction belongs to a different Arab-American entrepreneur, Albert George, a Lebanese-American immigrant. George started the George & Thomas Cone Company in 1918, which later became Joy Cone Co., now the largest ice cream cone company in the world. Joy manufactures more than 40 percent of the cones sold in U.S. stores and over 60 percent of those sold in ice cream shops and restaurants.
Read the full article here