What I'm Watching So You Don't Have To - by Ron Insana

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What I'm Watching So You Don't Have To<br>All Fed Up (A Short Diatribe)

Ron Insana<br>Aug 06, 2026

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In the fashion of a musician on stage, this missive goes out to all my colleagues who cover the Federal Reserve.<br>Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, hurled an insult at one of my brethren, the Wall Street Journal’s, Nick Timaros, but also impugned the work of many of my colleagues who work tirelessly to help Wall Street and Main Street better understand the policies and inner workings of the nation’s central bank.<br>The Message of the Markets is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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For no good reason, Bessent asserted the following this week:<br>“One of the highlights of the Warsh Fed has been watching stenographers posing as journalists, like the WSJ’s Nick Timiraos, reduced to reporting Fed backroom gossip because they’re incapable of performing real economic or monetary policy analysis without being spoon-fed.”<br>Having covered the Fed for 10 years myself, visiting the central bank several times a year for off-the-record meetings with everyone from the late Alan Greenspan to Ben Bernanke, Larry Meyer, Alan Blinder and others, covering the Fed is not a job for mere stenographers.<br>It requires not just taking copious notes of Fed news conferences but building a deep knowledge of how the Fed sets policy, how the “fractional reserve” banking system works, how policy affects markets and the overall economy, and how decision-makers arrive at their conclusions about economic growth, inflation, unemployment and, this is extremely important, how they deal with all too frequent shocks to the economic system.<br>It’s no easy task and I applaud not just Nick’s work but, most certainly, the outstanding work of my colleague Steve Liesman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, and the others who have had the difficult job of covering the central bank going back to the Volcker days, from John Berry to Jerry Seib, David Wessel, Greg Ip, Jon Hilsenrath and myriad others who do their damndest to get it right and share important information with those who need it most.<br>It’s ironic to note that Bessent accuses those who cover the Fed as being “spoon-fed,” when his hedge fund, when not operating under the tutelage and umbrella of legends, George Soros and Stan Druckenmiller, fell from $5.1 billion in assets under management in 2017 to $577 million.<br>People who, themselves, are spoon fed should not throw utensils.<br>The Secrets of the Temple<br>Back when I began covering business and economic news in 1984, the Fed was far from transparent.<br>“Fed Watchers,” as they were called then, divined policy changes from a wide variety of market-based signals, daily additions or subtractions of liquidity to the money markets by the Fed, newspaper leaks from inside the central bank and other forms of divination that made it very hard to understand what the Fed was up to.<br>So much so that it led Rolling Stone correspondent, William Greider, to pen “The Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country.”<br>A bit overwrought, but it was in response to the veil of secrecy behind which the Fed operated until Alan Greenspan took over and, slowly, began to offer more public explanations of Fed policy.<br>Glasnost at the Fed continued to expand under Ben Bernanke, Janet Yellen and Jay Powell, offering both Wall Street and Main Street a more vivid picture of not only what the Fed does but how and why it does it.<br>It appears that Kevin Warsh wants to go back to the future, to put it mildly.<br>As new Fed chair, Warsh, appears to be moving to make the Fed less transparent, getting rid of so-called forward guidance, the process by which the Fed signals the direction in which future policy is headed.<br>He also seems keen on reducing the number of speeches given by the chair and other Fed officials, and, quite possibly and much more important, reducing the number of policy-setting meetings undertaken by the Fed.<br>Such a move will have investors and consumers guessing as to the Fed’s next move for a much longer time than is currently the practice.<br>Those who cover the Fed will be forced to going back to reading the tea leaves of Fed open market operations, the weekly increases, or decreases, in the size of the money supply and obtain news from Fed members who are willing to leak information from inside the Temple to bolster their points of view without being named … the very anonymous sourcing Bessent is criticizing.<br>In other words, we go back to the days when the Fed told us little to nothing and kept markets guessing about policy changes in rates, or other actions, until they were confirmed well after the fact.<br>The Temple Sequel<br>Kevin Warsh’s second news conference was an unwieldy affair, to say the least.<br>He avoided answering pointed questions from reporters, failed to offer any insights into...