In September 2022, about a year after Joseph Wang left his job at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, he came across an odd new research paper from his former employer. Wang had been a senior trader on the Open Market Trading Desk, carrying out the Fed’s monetary policy. In his five years there, the usual Fed research covered topics like inflation, labor markets, and bank capital. This paper, though, was titled “800,000 Years of Climate Risk.”
“I thought that was very strange,” Wang recalled. “The Fed writing about CO2 concentrations.”
Wang wasn’t the only one to notice what looked like mission creep at the Fed. Just before Thanksgiving in 2021, a tweet from the St. Louis Fed suggested replacing Thanksgiving turkey with “a soybean-based dinner.” The post drew thousands of replies, many of them demanding that the Fed get back in its lane.
