Nov 12 (Reuters) - The US Federal Reserve on Thursday unveiled an updated schedule for monetary policy meetings for 2027 following Chairman Kevin Warsh's announcement last month that policymakers would
only debate and vote on interest rates seven times next year rather than the standard eight that has prevailed for decades.
Policymakers will still gather eight times, but the meeting set for October 26-27, 2027, now "will be dedicated to the discussion of broad monetary policy strategy issues," the Fed said in a statement.
The final scheduled meeting of the year will now be held on November 16-17 rather than the originally scheduled December 7-8, and that will be a rate-setting meeting. After that, officials will not meet until January 25-26, 2028, a full two-month gap, in keeping with Warsh's announcement last month.
"I expect that in 2028, we’ll have two meetings dedicated to discussions of strategy and six for setting policy," Warsh said at his October 28 press conference. That cadence would permit officials to have two months of economic data to assess between meetings.
Also, on the updated page listing Fed policy meetings, the meetings in 2027 for March, June and September are no longer marked with an asterisk designating them as gatherings at which officials submit their quarterly economic projections. Warsh is disdainful of the practice — started under former Chair Ben Bernanke — and has not submitted projections of his own since becoming Fed leader in May.
He has established a task force to review the Fed's communications practices and strategy, including whether to continue publishing the so-called dot plot of policymaker projections. That panel has not yet delivered its findings and recommendations to Warsh and the other 18 Fed policymakers.
(Reporting by Dan Burns; Editing by Andrea Ricci )
