Kashkari, Collins, Williams Join the Fed Calliope

Chairman Powell’s resistance mounts

Fed Chairman Jerome Powell

Financial markets are getting to a point where to interpret them, you almost need a degree in political science, not economics.

Here’s an April 3, 2025, Gallup Poll showing an eight percentage point gap between Republicans and Democrats when it comes to worry over inflation, with Democrats 23 points more worried than they were last year, and Republicans 18 points less worried than they were last year. The 2025 part is based on phone interviews conducted March 3-16, 2025.

Pew polling conducted January 27 to February 2, 2025 found 73 percent of Republicans and only 53 percent of Democrats listed inflation as “a very big problem in the country today.”

The University of Michigan has its own survey data—Joanne Hsu put out an April 11, 2025 report headlined “Partisan Perceptions and Sentiment Measurement,” that tracks the differences in short-term and long-term inflation expectations among Republicans, Democrats, and Independents.

And then there’s the now-famous Apollo rendering of the Michigan Survey’s “everyone switch sides” finding, which we ran here back on April 8.

We didn’t intend The Editors to be a daily Federal Reserve newsletter, and we don’t intend it to be. But one of the key aspects of “trustworthy information” is trying to pierce through the partisan bias. At the moment the biggest story is the calliope that Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell is playing of Fed officials with a public relations campaign that expresses Democratic anxiety rather than empirical analysis.