Warsh today clarified that he thinks none of the existing, published measures of inflation that remove price outliers, such as the Dallas Fed trimmed mean, reliably capture underlying price pressures: "None of those are very good measures of underlying inflation.... My view is that we need new measures to understand the underlying changes in inflation. Am I interested in what's the mean or median price of a good and a big box retailer? You bet I am. And none of these measures capture that. I am super interested in finding new measures to do a better job to help us inform our decisions so that the inflation of the last five years don't continue." At his confirmation hearing, he had referred to "trimmed averages" and "median type measures" as possibly more useful gauges of underlying inflation. This led to greater focus on median or trimmed mean gauges from Wall Street analysts who closely monitor inflation and map price data into their analysis of the Fed's reaction function. (In a WSJ story in May that was referenced at the hearing today, I wrote, "Warsh didn’t specify which trimmed mean he had in mind. The most widely cited is the Dallas Fed’s version...") https://www.wsj.com/economy/central-banking/kevin-warsh-wants-the-fed-to-think-about-inflation-differently-64272e0a(Nick Timiraos)