We Need to Talk About Kevin (Warsh)
Slate Money
Slate Podcasts
4.1 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 16 May 2026
⏱️ 44 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week: Kevin Warsh took over as Federal Reserve Chair, while Jerome Powell will remain on the board. Felix Salmon, Elizabeth Spiers, and Emily Peck, discuss how the Donald Trump appointee will deal with pressure from the president to lower rates despite rising inflation. Then, they cover Trump’s visit to China and what it could mean for the US-China power balance, particularly within the AI arms race. And finally, they get into how the AI boom is making semiconductor chips the “It Girl of the global economy.”
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Podcast production by Jessamine Molli and Cheyna Roth.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week. |
| 0:12.6 | I'm Felix Allen of Bloomberg with Elizabeth Spires of New York Times. |
| 0:16.1 | Hello. |
| 0:16.7 | With Emily Peck of Axios. |
| 0:18.6 | Hello, hello. |
| 0:19.5 | And we are going to talk about Kevin. |
| 0:21.5 | It's going to happen, people. |
| 0:22.8 | We're going to talk about Kevin Wash, who is the incoming chair of the Federal Reserve |
| 0:27.0 | and how he is going to fare in his new job. |
| 0:30.8 | We are going to talk about China, where Donald Trump just spent a few days, |
| 0:35.5 | palling around with President Xi |
| 0:37.5 | and whether that is going to amount to anything, |
| 0:40.6 | and especially whether that might even help put an end to the Iran War. |
| 0:44.3 | We are going to talk about semiconductors and why they are all of the new hotness right now. |
| 0:50.3 | We have a Slate Plus segment on subscriptions, which you can only listen to if you have |
| 0:55.7 | bought a subscription to Slate Plus. Whoa. It's recursive. It's all coming up on Slate Money. |
| 1:08.3 | Okay, so the Senate confirmed Kevin Walsh as the new Fed chair, to no one's surprise. |
| 1:17.5 | It was held up a little bit until Janine Piro dropped her case against the Fed. |
| 1:22.0 | But she's like, I can reopen it at any time. |
| 1:24.7 | So Jay Powell was like, yeah, in that case, I'm just going to stick around. |
| 1:28.9 | So now we're going to have a pretty unprecedented situation where the replacement Fed chair is going to be in these meetings with Jay Powell, his predecessor. |
| 1:39.2 | And Powell has all of the years of gravitas and experience and respect and all the rest of it. And Kevin |
... |
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