With the MLB playoffs in full swing, Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller fittingly used a baseball analogy when asked how his recent interview for Fed chair went.
“I thought it went well,” Waller said during a CNBC appearance. “I didn’t get hit by a pitch.”
Waller, a member of the Fed’s Board of Governors since 2020, is among the finalists being considered to replace Chairman Jerome Powell, whose term expires in May 2026.
Others under consideration for the powerful central banking position include current Fed Governor Michelle Bowman, former Fed Governor Kevin Warsh and National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett, according to CNBC. A late entry into the jockeying race for next Fed chair, BlackRock fixed-income executive Rick Rieder, is also still a candidate, per the news outlet.
The interviews are being led by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who himself was once under consideration for Fed chief but formally declined the job in August. Waller described the vetting process as being apolitical and focused on serious economic discussions.
The focal point of Waller’s CNBC interview was not his career status but rather the state of the overall labor market, inflation and the broader economy — and how those factors play into the potential rate-cutting path of the Federal Reserve.
Waller acknowledged that the government shutdown that has delayed or halted inflation and jobs data from the government has presented a less-than-ideal situation for the Fed. But he said the announcement from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that it will recall workers to issue September consumer price index inflation data “helps a lot,” and labor reports from private firms like The Carlyle Group and ADP do a decent job of filling in data gaps.
“They’re not really representative and they’re very specific, but they’re all telling you the same story: The labor market is weak,” Waller said of those private data reports.
As for future rate cuts, Waller’s latest comments were cautiously dovish, calling for sequential quarter-point rate cuts so that the Fed can recalibrate if inflation proves stickier than anticipated and the labor market improves.
He appeared dismissive of comments by newly installed Fed Governor Stephen Miran, who voted for a jumbo half-point rate cut at the Fed’s mid-September meeting and said in a speech later that month that he believes the benchmark federal funds rate should be almost two percentage points lower than current policy.
When asked if he agrees with Miran’s stance that he’s seeing almost no tariff-based inflation, even in imported goods, Waller responded: “No, we see it in various measures, and all I have to do is go talk to businesses, and they’ll tell you.”
Waller said tariffs are being passed through to consumers in a two-tiered manner, in which businesses who serve higher-income, “price insensitive” consumers are letting them bear the brunt of tariff costs. But businesses catering to lower-income consumers aren’t, “because their customers will walk out the door.”
“You can simply look at the change in prices of goods over the last six months and plot it against the tariffs, and there’s a very clear correlation between the size of the tariff and the change in the price in those goods over the last six months,” Waller said. “It’s about a 40% pass-through.”
