美联储开始每年减少政策会议次数The Fed Begins Transition to Holding Fewer Policy Meetings a Year

In 2027, the Federal Reserve will begin a transition to holding fewer policy meetings a year, a change that seems monumental for such a staid institution, but one that will actually return the US central bank to bygone ways of operating.

Chairman Kevin Warsh, who has promised to enact sweeping change at the Fed, said that by 2028 the Fed would use two of its eight annual meetings to discuss broad strategy instead of voting on interest rates.

It’s the first change to the Fed calendar since the early 1980s, when it moved to eight meetings from 12. Though investors have raised worries that a new schedule could disrupt markets, defenders have dismissed those concerns and said it will give policymakers back time — used in the past to deliberate special topics — that it lost through a series of incremental changes.

“This is not unprecedented for the FOMC, even in recent times,” said Loretta Mester, who joined the central bank in 1985 and served as president of the Cleveland Fed from 2014 to 2024, attending most Federal Open Market Committee meetings since 2000.

It harkens back to the years before the financial crisis, a time familiar to Warsh, who was a Fed governor from 2006 to 2011. In those years, six of the Fed’s eight annual meetings were single-day affairs reserved mostly for talking about the economy and monetary policy, and voting on interest rates. The two remaining gatherings included a second day to wrestle with larger economic themes.

The crisis, which exploded in 2008, commanded all the Fed’s attention and necessitated longer meetings more frequently.

In 2012, the Fed officially adopted a permanent, two-day meeting schedule. But half of those were followed by the chair’s press conference — introduced by Chairman Ben S. Bernanke in 2011. Those usually ended early, allowing Bernanke time to prepare for the podium.

When Jerome Powell became chair in 2018, he expanded the press conference to every meeting. The bulk of the work then took place on day one, with day two typically wrapping up after officials voted on rates.

In the discussion time that remained it became harder, Mester said, to address big, meaty topics while also making difficult calls on monetary policy. “Taking a bit more time to actually have those conversations is a good thing,” she said.

Warsh has said he wants to re-examine much of how the Fed operates, from the data it uses to assess the economy, to how it communicates. Many of his bigger ambitions will require deliberation and approval by his colleagues.

Earlier this year Warsh established task forces of outside experts to look at five key areas of Fed operations and propose new ideas. Those reports are due around the end of this year.

“If they’re going to make progress on broader issues, they’ve got to create some time to do that,” said Ellen Meade, an economics professor at Duke University and a former Fed adviser who attended many FOMC meetings from 2011 to 2020.

Yet the details of the new calendar will be important, Meade said. The Fed could keep to its current cadence of one meeting every six-to-seven weeks, and simply designate two as non-voting sessions. Or it could completely revamp the schedule, with the six voting meetings evenly spaced out every two months and two special-topic meetings tucked in around them.

Richmond Fed President Tom Barkin on Thursday praised the idea of scheduling meetings every two months.

“I really don’t like having FOMC meetings and then walking out and getting a jobs report on Friday,” Barkin said of the current calendar. “If you did it every two months, then you could, in fact, have the full suite of data twice in a row and make decisions based on two cycles of data.”Barkin said the shift is otherwise not a big departure for the central bank. William Dudley, who served as New York Fed president from 2009 to 2018, echoed that sentiment, saying there’s no magic number of meetings. What’s more important, he argued, is that markets understand how the Fed is likely to react under different economic conditions — what economists call the reaction function.

“I’m not sure if these things are really going to be that substantive in terms of making the Fed more effective as an institution,” Dudley said of the changes.

Warsh has said the current meeting frequency, and the inclusion of press conferences after each FOMC gathering, drives Fed watchers and markets to focus too narrowly on policymakers’ incremental actions.

He said the big questions — like what’s happening with productivity or demographics, or how the economy is weathering shocks — ultimately matter more.

Holding fewer voting meetings, intentionally spaced out throughout the year, would allow policymakers to gather more economic data between each rate decision, both Mester and Meade said. It could also avoid awkward dates, like last week’s, when officials voted on rates just a day before the release of key third-quarter economic data. That gathering also came just days before the midterm elections, casting a political shadow over the Fed’s decision.

But there are also drawbacks to fewer rate-setting gatherings. For starters, shifting the cadence might force the Fed to alter the release of economic forecasts and rate projections, which currently fall on a neat, quarterly schedule in line with every other FOMC meeting.

With fewer live meetings, officials might also more frequently move rates by larger amounts than the traditional quarter percentage point, Derek Tang, an economist at Monetary Policy Analytics, wrote in a note to clients. Even the expectation of larger moves could trigger greater market volatility.

Georgetown University economist Masaaki Yoshimori, a proponent of moving to fewer but better-timed meetings, said the Fed should accompany such a decision with an explicit readiness to convene additional gatherings, if needed.

“The risk associated with moving from eight to six meetings is not necessarily that six normal-period meetings are insufficient on average,” Yoshimori, who met with Warsh in August, said in a research paper. “It is that an unexpected disturbance may occur during the longer interval between meetings.”