Fed Chairman Warsh at Sintra Four weeks to another monetary policy decision

Research evidence excerpt

Fed Chairman Warsh at Sintra Four weeks to another monetary policy decision

Economics ● United States

1 July 2026

On the upside, World Cup-related hiring could be a tailwind: in recent months the data have already shown faster job increases in the

food services and drinking places industry, including a 48,000 increase in May.

But Chairman Warsh’s broad views on economic data raise some questions about how traditional economic releases should be

interpreted (one of the five task forces Warsh has announced is specifically aimed at the measurement and interpretation of data). At

Sintra, Warsh reiterated the aspiration that “Nine to 12 months from now, we’re going to be using new technologies to understand

what is happening in the real economy in a contemporaneous, real-time way… that positions us to make better decisions. That we’re

no longer going to have to rely solely on data that we get from government agencies, with mismeasurement problems, that have

surveys that are no longer relevant.”

One of Chairman Warsh’s concerns relates to the data revisions that frequently accompany some of the traditional economic

releases. For example, tabulations from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that the mean absolute revision to monthly payroll

changes has been around 50,000 over recent years – these revisions stem from the additional data collection that occurs in the two

months that follow each initial monthly release. Perhaps even more notably, the “benchmark” revisions to payrolls have been quite

large in recent years (for example: -898,000 in the March 2025 benchmark, -589,000 for the March 2024 benchmark, -266,000 in

March 2023 benchmark). Even now, this issue creates some uncertainty about how much of the acceleration in payroll employment