沃什掌舵美联储：一场为AI生产力让路的资本布局

Original Author: Raoul Pal

Original Translation: AididiaoJP, Foresight News

Today, the Senate confirmed Kevin Warsh as the 17th Chair of the Federal Reserve by a vote of 54 to 45, the narrowest vote for and against in the institution's history. The media interprets this as a political story: Trump finally got his way, Democrats fought hard, Fetterman crossed the aisle to vote in favor, and partisan divides have now extended to the Fed.

That's just the surface. Almost no one truly understands the real story. To see it clearly, you must stop judging this vote with a left-right scorecard and instead ask a different question: Who chose Warsh, what did they buy when they chose him, and what does this mean for markets over the next two years?

Why Warsh, Specifically?

I want to start from an unusual place because the framework matters.

I've spent the past few years developing a framework called the Universal Code. Its First Law is simple: The universe is organized to maximize intelligent output per unit of energy consumed. Life generates more intelligence than mere chemical reactions. Civilization generates more intelligence than biology. AI generates more intelligence than civilizations built around human cognition. Because this is the gradient the universe selects for, capital follows it. Capital flows to whichever configuration generates the most intelligence per unit of energy at any given moment.

That is the First Law of the Universal Code. It applies to biology, civilization, markets, and AI training runs. On the actual trajectory the world is on, the configuration that wins this gradient is an AI-accelerated semiconductor cycle, layered on top of an accelerated energy buildout, all compounding within an exponential phase. Capital is being pulled toward this configuration by a force that conventional macro models cannot explain because they lack this First Law. Everything else follows. Political alliances are re-aligning around who can provide access to the underlying substrate. Geopolitical alliances are reshaping around who controls the chips, the energy, and the dollar pipeline that funds it all. This week's Beijing summit, the Gulf's compute buildout, the Western semiconductor reshoring, and the donor coalition reshaping Washington politics are not separate stories.

They are expressions of the same gradient at different scales. Nations and alignments that align with the gradient compound; those that fight it decline.

If you accept this framework, then the most important variable in the macro environment over the next decade is whether monetary policy obstructs or accommodates this routing. A Fed that fights the AI buildout with restrictive rates will strangle the substrate transformation the global economy now depends on. A Fed that accommodates it will let the productivity wave do its work.

Kevin Warsh is the candidate for Fed Chair with the deepest personal insight into this routing. For most of the past decade, he hasn't been a central banker; he has been a director and a tech investor. He served on boards, and as a private investor, he allocated capital into the AI infrastructure stack. He observed from inside the rooms where this buildout happens, not from FOMC briefing books. When he says he believes a productivity boom will lead America to win the 21st century, he isn't making an optimistic forecast. He is stating an investor conviction based on what he has seen with his own eyes and where he has personally invested.

This is the part the media coverage keeps missing. He is not a hawk who switched camps because Trump promised him a job. He is an investor who has been long the productivity miracle for years and now controls the institution that determines whether that miracle compounds or is strangled by tight money. The other major candidates Trump considered lacked this background entirely. One was an academic economist, the other a community banker. Kevin Warsh is the only one of the three who has actually deployed capital into the substrate of the next decade.

This makes him the First Law candidate. He is the operator whose public beliefs and personal portfolio both point to keeping the fastest channel for intelligence compounding open.

What Warsh Has Been Saying

Over the past twelve months, Warsh has laid out an unusually specific monetary policy agenda on the public record. He has explicitly called for what he terms a 'regime change' at the Fed. He has explicitly called for a new Treasury-Fed Accord modeled after the 1951 Accord. He has proposed reforming the inflation data the Fed uses. He has proposed removing forward guidance from communications. He has proposed encouraging more internal dissent on interest rate decisions. He has proposed shrinking the Fed's balance sheet and coordinating this posture with Treasury debt management.

Read individually, these sound like the technical preferences of a thoughtful former Fed governor. Read together, they describe an operating model that combines two different historical blueprints. One is the financial repression playbook from 1946-1955. The other is the Greenspan productivity-led playbook from the late 1990s. The combination of the two is precisely what is needed right now.

The Greenspan Playbook is the Real Template

The 1951 framework is the rhetorical cover. The Greenspan late-1990s playbook is the actual operational template.

Here is what Greenspan did from 1996 to 2000. The economy was running hot. Unemployment was below what conventional models called the natural rate. Headline CPI was elevated at times due to oil and food price volatility. But the key data point was that core inflation, excluding food and energy, did not accelerate as the Phillips Curve predicted. Greenspan looked at the productivity data and concluded something structural was happening.

The IT investment cycle was driving productivity gains, suppressing unit labor costs without needing labor market slack. Even as headline CPI fluctuated, core CPI remained anchored. He concluded he could ignore the noisy headline data because the underlying core was being suppressed by productivity. Conventional doctrine called for significant rate hikes to preempt imminent inflation. Greenspan refused. He kept rates low. He let asset prices run. He let the expansion compound for four more years than a standard reaction function would have allowed. His coordinated relationship with Treasury Secretary Rubin and later Summers was nicknamed the 'Committee to Save the World'.

The Fed and Treasury effectively ran a strategy as one institution. Greenspan's final rate hikes in 1999-2000 are now widely understood as a policy mistake; productivity could have absorbed more inflation.

What Bessent and Trump want is the 2026-2030 version of this operation. AI is the equivalent of the IT cycle, but on a much larger scale. AI capital expenditure is running at multiples of late-1990s tech capex. If the productivity wave is real, then the Fed can run looser policy than conventional models suggest because even if the economy runs hot, productivity suppresses unit labor costs. Ease rates slightly, no dramatic moves. Let productivity absorb the slack. Let the economic transformation do the deflationary work that rate hikes would never accomplish anyway.

This is why Warsh is indispensable. He is the candidate who truly believes the productivity miracle is real because he has been investing in it. He carries the institutional credibility from his 2006-2011 global financial crisis tenure to hold the line when media and traditional Fed networks demand he hike rates on the latest CPI print. He has the rhetorical cover (the 1951 framework) to install the coordination architecture without appearing captured. And he possesses the personal conviction to repeatedly 'do nothing' in the face of inflation data that would compel weaker-belief operators to react.

The Greenspan playbook only works if the operator running it truly believes the productivity miracle is real. That is the test. Powell's conviction isn't deep enough. Warsh, maybe, can read it from the data, but he won't have Warsh's investor conviction. Warsh is the only available candidate who has personally bet on it.

Why Does This Have to Happen?

US federal debt is roughly $36 trillion. At the current maturity structure, about $9-10 trillion rolls over annually. The Fed has been raising rates while running quantitative tightening, meaning it shrinks its own balance sheet while the Treasury issues record debt to fund deficits. The marginal buyer of long-term Treasuries must be the private sector, a large portion of which is foreign buyers.

In a world where foreign buyers are structurally overweight dollars, this works. In our world, where China has been a net seller for several consecutive years and Japan manages its own currency weakness with a portfolio it cannot massively expand, the situation is different. Long-term yields drift upward. Term premium expands. The cost of refinancing debt rises faster than economic growth. It gets harder every year.

You can solve this problem two ways. You can pursue fiscal austerity, which is politically impossible at the required scale. Or you can pursue financial repression. There is no third option that is honest about the numbers.

The architecture being built is the financial repression option, packaged in modern institutional language and combined with the Greenspan productivity bet to make it socially sustainable. The Treasury issues short-term bills at the front end of the curve, where demand is structurally inelastic. Banks rebuild their balance sheets under new regulatory frameworks to absorb duration at the back end of the curve. The Fed runs a posture that does not fight this architecture with aggressive rate hikes. Stablecoin issuers absorb hundreds of billions in short-term Treasuries as part of their reserve composition. The dollar depreciates enough to attract the necessary foreign duration buying.

To make this happen, you need a Fed Chair who correctly understands the situation and will not fight it. It is no coincidence that Warsh has spent the last twelve months publicly describing the precise policy posture this architecture demands.

Bessent's International Playbook

Another key operator in this architecture is Bessent at the Treasury. Most reporting frames Bessent as a domestic figure with the fiscal portfolio. This is wrong. Bessent's most important work is international.

The architecture requires foreign buyers to absorb a meaningful share of long-term Treasury issuance so the rollover math clears at acceptable real yields. Foreign buyers will only step in if three things are true. The dollar must be depreciating, not appreciating; otherwise, they take FX losses. They must have a strategic reason to hold Treasuries, not just yield, as yield alone is insufficient to offset FX risk. They need an institutional channel to recycle their dollar surpluses back into Treasuries.

Bessent is running all three things simultaneously. Yesterday's Beijing summit is the most visible piece. The architecture being negotiated with China is primarily not a trade agreement. It is a management framework where China receives explicit access to the American substrate (chips, capital equipment, AI infrastructure) under specific licensing arrangements in exchange for not selling its dollar reserves, continuing to recycle trade surpluses into Treasuries through intermediary chains, and accepting substrate access tariffs (the Nvidia 25% fee model is a proven example). This is not a free trade arrangement. It is a financial repression-era industrial agreement wrapped in trade language.

Parallel models are also running with Japan and South Korea (the cleanest channel for recycling North Asian surpluses into Treasuries), the UAE (being constructed as a new intermediary pole expanded via Fed swap lines), Hong Kong (as the traditional conduit to China, retained for continuity), and Singapore (as the residual cross-Asia clearing center). The architecture is multi-polar by design, not bilateral. Bilateral arrangements have a single point of failure; multi-polar arrangements have redundancy. Bessent is wiring redundant foreign duration buying into the rollover architecture.

This is where Warsh and Bessent coordinate, and why the Treasury-Fed Accord that Warsh keeps invoking matters substantively. Bessent secures foreign duration buying through bilateral agreements and FX management. Warsh ensures Fed policy does not break that buying by being too restrictive. If the Fed runs tight monetary policy, US real yields rise, foreign holders incur larger currency losses, making foreign duration buying harder to clear. If the Fed runs loose monetary policy, US real yields fall, the dollar depreciates, and foreign buyers can absorb the Treasury issuance on acceptable terms. The Accord is the institutional document that allows the Fed to run the second posture rather than the first.

The 'Committee to Save the World' ran this coordination twenty-five years ago under Greenspan and Rubin. The LTCM rescue, the Asia crisis response, and the late-1990s productivity boom all sat within the same coordinated framework. Warsh and Bessent are the 2026 version of the Committee. The difference is that the 2026 version faces an international financial architecture far more contested than anything Greenspan and Rubin ever faced.

The Donor Coalition

Beneath the visible political layer is the decisive principal coalition that has been in place since 2024. Crypto founders, AI infrastructure operators, energy capital allocators. These are the people who fund the political operation that delivers this architecture. They are not buying ideology. They are buying execution capability. They want stablecoin regulatory clarity, AI capex policy stability, energy permitting acceleration, and a monetary policy environment that does not strangle the AI buildout with restrictive rates.

The Trump administration is the operator. Bessent at Treasury is the architect of the international leg. Warsh at the Fed is the domestic institutional anchor. The Republican Senate majority is the formal delivery mechanism. The donor coalition is the deeper substrate beneath it all.

When you read Warsh's election with this framework, it stops looking like a partisan struggle and starts looking like a contract being executed. The donor coalition wanted the Fed Chair seat. They got the Fed Chair seat. The vote count is the formal delivery document.

What This Means for Markets

If you accept this framework, several things follow.

Warsh's first FOMC meeting is June 16-17. He cannot cut rates with headline CPI above 4% and energy prices high without immediately destroying his own credibility. So the meeting will not deliver a rate cut. What it will deliver is signaling, and the signal will be more specific than the media expects. Warsh will begin shifting the institutional focus from headline CPI to core, describing the energy price spike driven by the US-Iran war as transitory. He will signal that the 2% target has more flexibility than markets currently price, treating it as a long-run average rather than a hard monthly upper bound every print must obey. He will soften forward guidance, adopting a more discretionary reaction-function tone. He will almost certainly launch a formal monetary policy framework review, targeting completion by 2027. None of these are rate cuts. But all of them are the institutional reconstruction that allows rate cuts to arrive later without being interpreted by the bond market as political capitulation.

By the end of 2026, the framework review will be public. By mid-2027, a visible Treasury-Fed Accord will be announced or formally negotiated. By the end of 2027, the federal funds rate will be 250 to 325 basis points lower than current levels. The Fed will be visibly ignoring services inflation prints in the 3-4% range while nominal GDP runs at 5-6%. Gold continues to rally because financial repression is precisely the moment gold prices. The dollar depreciates enough to clear foreign duration buying. Cryptocurrencies compound because the substrate transformation operates independently of monetary policy, and the architecture's institutional guarantee just became more solid in the Fed Chair seat. AI capex names compound because the cost of capital is no longer the tail risk.

There is one variable that can break the entire setup. It is not Warsh's policy preference. It is the bond market itself.

If long-term Treasury yields consistently stay above 5.5%, or if the term premium consistently stays above 1.5%, or if the 10-year real yield consistently stays above 2.75%, then regardless of what Warsh does at the Fed, the architecture will collapse from the outside in. The bond market is the binding constraint. Warsh's installation removes one institutional risk but does not remove that one.

This is why the next six months are so important. They are the period when the bond market either gives the new Fed Chair the space to install the architecture or does not. If it does, the cycle extends at least into 2027, potentially deep into 2028. Risk assets compound. Crypto and AI capex names are the biggest beneficiaries. If the bond market revolts over the next six months due to hot inflation data, the architecture risks failing before it can operationally exist.

What to Remember

First, Warsh is not what the news suggests. He is not Trump's puppet. He is the structurally correct operator for what they are actually trying to do: run the Greenspan late-1990s playbook atop the 1946-1955 financial repression architecture, with AI replacing the IT cycle as the productivity engine. His tech investor background is the key qualification, not his 2006-2011 Fed governor record. He has been long this miracle for years.

Second, Bessent's international architecture is the other half of the operation. The Treasury-Fed Accord that Warsh keeps invoking is the institutional document. The actual substance is Bessent securing foreign duration buying through bilateral agreements with China, Japan, South Korea, the Gulf, and a broader multi-polar intermediary network, while Warsh runs Fed policy consistent with that Treasury funding need. Neither operator works without the other. This week's China agreement and today's Warsh confirmation are two pieces of the same architecture, not two separate stories.

Third, the real test is not Warsh's first FOMC meeting. It is the bond market's behavior over the next two quarters. Watch the 10-year yield, the term premium, and the real yield. These are the variables that determine whether the architecture executes or breaks.

The market is still pricing for a conventional inflation fight. This framework views that conventional fight as structurally unlikely because the productivity wave will do the deflationary work the Fed cannot achieve, and foreign duration buying will clear the rollover the bond market cannot clear alone.

The gap between these two price points is the asymmetry. This asymmetry is where the returns of the next two years lie.