Warsh can quiet one seat on an FOMC that averaged 196 speeches a year

In the Volcker years the committee's 19 members gave 90 speeches a year, and the chair took more than one in five of them ^[6]. That leaves fewer than 72 a year for the other 18 people, about four each ^[1]. Under Ben Bernanke the committee averaged more than 200 prepared remarks a year and the chair accounted for 13% of them, so more than 174 fell to the same 18 seats, close to ten each ^[8][2]. The seat count never changed. The growth is per speaker, roughly 2.4 times more prepared remarks from each non-chair between the two eras ^[3].

The chair's own output rose while his share fell. More than one in five of 90 is upwards of 18 speeches a year for Paul Volcker; 13% of more than 200 is upwards of 26 for Bernanke ^[7].

What the non-chairs talked about changed too. Under Volcker and Alan Greenspan, more than 43% of non-chair speeches made no mention of monetary policy; under Bernanke, Janet Yellen and Jerome Powell, fewer than 27% left it out ^[13]. Multiply the two: at most about 41 non-chair speeches a year touched monetary policy in the Volcker era, against at least about 127 under Bernanke, more than a threefold increase ^[4].

Those counts understate the supply. FRASER, the archive the St. Louis Fed maintains, holds prewritten speeches, official statements, congressional testimony and transcripts of a handful of press conferences from the governors and the 12 reserve bank presidents, and it does not capture unscripted conversations or media interviews, which have become a popular channel for non-chair members over the past 20 years ^[10]. "The CNBC, Bloomberg opportunities to voice your views weren't there," said Don Kohn, the Fed's vice chair from 2006 to 2010 ^[11]. Alan Blinder, a former Fed vice chair, said the amount of talking about monetary policy he did in the 1990s "was completely trivial compared to what many members of the FOMC do today. It was a peanut shell compared to a tree." ^[12]

Warsh controls his own speaking calendar. Three sets of prepared remarks since he was sworn in, fewer than other new chairs manage, and forward guidance withheld in all three ^[3]. "A quieter Fed, more purposeful in its communications, is better able to meet its objectives," he said last month ^[2]. He is not spending speeches to prepare the market for this week's decision. Cutting the system's total output would take coordination across the Federal Reserve, or a crackdown reversing a decades-long transparency effort ^[4].

Volume already fell without any crackdown, to about 196 a year between 2014 and 2025, roughly four a week across the whole committee ^[9][5]. And a chair who withholds guidance makes each of his own sentences rarer; rare sentences from the chair tend to matter more to the front end than frequent ones from a reserve bank president.

The American Banker analysis counts speeches; it does not test prices. Its finding that markets are listening to the non-chairs rests on the volume ^[1][5]. With a resounding majority of participants expecting a 25 basis point rate hike at this week's meeting, I would expect the path to be priced off the statement and off his colleagues ^[14]. If the governors and presidents go quiet in the weeks after the vote, or all land on the chair's line, that expectation is wrong.