Fed Chair Warsh (Q&A): Doesn't believe in forward guidance, absence a crisis; not going to pre-judge meetings

• Won't share musings on what will happen in December.
• Might learn a lot by then, will be better positioned to determine right policy decision.

A chair disavowing forward guidance outside of crises marks a regime shift in how policy is communicated, and episodes of that kind have historically raised the information content of each meeting and each data print, since the market loses the calendar-based anchor and must price the reaction function directly. The transmission runs through the front end: with the path no longer pre-committed, the sensitivity of short-dated rates to inflation and labour releases rises, and implied volatility around meeting dates tends to sit higher than under guidance-heavy regimes. The refusal to pre-judge December is the operational corollary, and the distinction worth drawing is between genuine data dependence and an unchanged reaction function merely dressed in new language; the former reprices with each print, the latter is cosmetic. Historically, chairs sceptical of guidance have leaned on the dot-free, meeting-by-meeting framing precisely to retain optionality, and the tell is whether the rest of the committee adopts the same register or continues to signal, since mixed communication has tended to produce the noisiest pricing. Worth noting is the carve-out for crises, which preserves guidance as an emergency tool and implies an asymmetric reaction function rather than a doctrinaire one. The follow-ons are how incoming officials and the statement language evolve, and whether December pricing starts to track the data calendar more tightly.