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Warsh Holds Rates at His Second FOMC Press Conference as Three Members Dissent for a Hike, Jul. 29, 2026

July 29, 2026 · Federal Reserve · 0:45:04

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

Chair Kevin Warsh held his second FOMC press conference on July 29, 2026, opening with the decision: “our Committee decided to vote by a 9-to-3 vote to maintain the target range for the federal funds rate at 3½ to 3¾ percent.” The three dissenters — Cleveland Fed President Beth Hammack, Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari, and Dallas Fed President Lorie Logan — each preferred a 25-basis-point increase, according to the FOMC statement. The statement itself was carried over word for word from June, a choice Warsh defended as deliberate: the statement “conveys just the facts” and steers “clear of forecasting, a choice we consider especially prudent at these uncertain times.”

Warsh used the press conference to close off any reading of the hold as tolerance for higher inflation: “There is no soft inflation target; there is no soft implicit target — not on this Committee’s watch. There’s only a target, and it’s 2 percent.” He said job gains had kept pace with the workforce and the unemployment rate had changed little, that the economy was “showing impressive resilience,” and that five-plus years of above-target inflation “cannot be cured in nine weeks — or by a single month of modest price decreases.” He characterized the split vote as a healthy argument inside the Committee — a “good family fight,” as his description was reported — and repeated the new regime’s premise that markets should price the economy rather than the Fed’s own forecasts.

Why it matters

July is where the Warsh Fed’s internal divide went on the record: the chair held the line at a hold while a quarter of the Committee voted to hike, six weeks before the Committee moved unanimously in September. It is the middle panel of the 2026 rate story this chronicle scores on the Economy hub — a President demanding cuts, a chair refusing guidance, and a committee drifting toward tightening.

Scoreboard watch

This is a candidate item for the weekly scoreboard: the July 29, 2026 FOMC decision (9–3 hold at 3.50–3.75 percent, with Hammack, Kashkari, and Logan dissenting for a 25-basis-point increase) and Warsh’s “no soft inflation target” commitment — each as stated in the FOMC statement and the press conference transcript, to be checked against the September 2026 FOMC decision.

Sources: Federal Reserve, “FOMC Press Conference, July 29, 2026” (the Federal Reserve’s official upload, embedded above); transcript of Chairman Warsh’s press conference, July 29, 2026, Federal Reserve; FOMC statement, July 29, 2026. All figures and characterizations as stated by Chair Warsh and the Committee.