Mark Delaney: Michael, I was trying to explain what happened at the FOMC this week to my brother-in-law — he's a contractor, totally normal guy — and I got like two sentences in and he goes, 'wait, the Fed just... said nothing?' And I was like, uh, yeah, kind of exactly that.
Michael C. Vincent: And he is not wrong.
Mark Delaney: He's really not. Kevin Warsh's June 2026 policy statement — the one that came out of a two-day FOMC meeting, June 16th and 17th — it was 130 words. No forward guidance. Nothing about what happens next. And separately, for the first time since the dot plot was introduced in January 2012, the Fed Chair didn't submit a rate projection at all.
Michael C. Vincent: Hold that thought on the dot — because here's what that absence actually reveals. The 18 projections that were submitted split 9-9. Exactly. Half the Federal Open Market Committee thinks rates go higher this year. Half think flat or lower. Warsh's dot wouldn't have broken the tie. It would have picked a side.
Mark Delaney: Oh — wait, so you're saying the abstention wasn't just a communications philosophy thing, it was a way to avoid being on record in an evenly split committee?
Michael C. Vincent: That is exactly the question. Warsh called the dot plot 'a draft sketched in pencil that can be erased at any time.' Which is either a principled reform stance — or it's the most elegant exit from an impossible position I've seen in a long time.
Mark Delaney: But here's where I'm not sure the 'principled reform stance' framing holds — I mean, was the dot ever actually a hard commitment? Like, uh, I always thought it was just a rough sketch anyway.
Michael C. Vincent: That's the confession. Warsh told you himself — 'a draft sketched in pencil.' But markets didn't treat it like pencil. They built rate expectations on it. Fourteen years of that. And now the chair is essentially saying, we were all reading tea leaves.
Mark Delaney: Wait, no — imagine your financial advisor sends you a forecast from nine colleagues who say rates go up and nine who say flat, and then refuses to give you their own view. That's the actual situation right now.
Michael C. Vincent: And you'd fire that advisor.
Mark Delaney: Right — but the part that doesn't fit is, Eric Engstrom at the Federal Reserve Board just published a working paper called 'Anchored to the Dot Plot' arguing that these projections actually do anchor expectations. That paper's circulating right now. Someone's making the academic case for the tool at the exact moment Warsh's dismantling it — and we haven't even gotten to whether the interim cost of that silence is actually worth it.
Michael C. Vincent: You see, that is the real story. The headline is 'chair skips the dot.' The actual signal is that a 9-9 split inside the FOMC made unified forward guidance structurally impossible — the dot was already broken before Warsh touched it.
Mark Delaney: But that's actually the take I want to push back on — the one going around right now, that Warsh is doing a Greenspan, like this is a principled return to earned opacity. I'm not buying it. Because Greenspan operated before markets had built fourteen years of trading infrastructure around Fed projections. You can't just — uh, you can't pull the scaffolding and say the building was always meant to stand alone.
Michael C. Vincent: The Engstrom paper makes exactly that case. A Federal Reserve Board staff economist — not an outside critic — publishing right now that dot-plot projections actually anchor expectations. That is not a coincidence of timing.
Mark Delaney: A Fed staff paper. Against the chair's own move.
Michael C. Vincent: Now — the Brookings Institution asked whether scenario-based forecasts could replace the dot plot. Their answer was essentially: we don't know yet. No ready substitute exists. Warsh announced the communications review gets completed by year-end. Year-end.
Mark Delaney: Which means — okay, I mean, picture a pension manager repricing a long-duration bond portfolio on June 18th. No chair dot, no forward guidance in that 130-word statement, 9-9 split. Her next scheduled on-record signal from the FOMC is the meeting minutes on July 8th. That's it. That's her whole information set.
Michael C. Vincent: And the minutes are a lagging document. They tell you what the committee argued three weeks ago.
Mark Delaney: No, exactly — so the 'principled reset' framing collapses right there. The interim cost isn't abstract. It's a real person making a real call on July 8th with three-week-old data and no guidance. The review being done by year-end doesn't help her today.
Michael C. Vincent: Well. The silence isn't neutral. It just redistributes the uncertainty — away from the Fed, onto everyone pricing risk right now.
Mark Delaney: David Wessel said on PBS NewsHour, when Amna Nawaz pressed him on this, that what Warsh is doing isn't a procedural tweak. It's a fundamental shift in how the Fed talks to the world. And I think that's right, but I mean — a fundamental shift with no announced replacement? While you're 9-9 internally? That's not a shift, that's a... I don't know what that is.
Michael C. Vincent: The communications review lands by year-end. No replacement tool named. That is the genuine open question — if the Federal Reserve Board scraps the dot plot entirely after this review, what actually anchors rate expectations for a committee that cannot agree on which direction it is heading? I don't have an answer. I'm not sure Warsh does yet either.
Mark Delaney: Yeah. No, I don't either.
Michael C. Vincent: Good conversation. Genuinely uncomfortable one.
