Kevin Warsh used his first Jackson Hole speech as Fed chair to double-, triple- and quadruple-down on what, forgive me, feels like a pathological aversion to forward guidance.

He also reiterated, in seemingly unequivocal terms, that i) inflation’s been far too high for far too long, ii) the responsibility for that overshoot falls squarely on the shoulders of the institution he now leads and iii) the Fed will restore price stability, defined as 2% annual PCE inflation, which he called “a firm, fixed target.”

In other words, Warsh’s Jackson Hole speech, entitled “In Our Time,” was a long-winded version of his June FOMC press conference (the one that didn’t go awry) and his remarks in Wyoming betrayed the same cringeworthy pretensions to oratory eloquence on display during both the June and July pressers.

From where I’m sitting anyway, Warsh’s excoriation of policymaker over-communication carries an air of “The chair doth protest too much, methinks.” He says all the “right” things when it comes to critiquing the pitfalls associated with excessive forward guidance, but try as he might to come across as reflective and sincere, Warsh’s comments sound scripted, and not just because, in this case, he was reading from a pre-written speech.

Consider that Warsh dedicated a whole section of his Friday address to explaining why he thinks the Fed should do less explaining. That section by itself clocked in at an impressive 839 words. Warsh, then, wrote an entire essay about over-communicating. The irony was lost on him.

To be fair — and he mentioned this — Warsh’s disdain for forward guidance goes back a very long way. It’s not a newly-adopted position, and can’t be chalked up to some backdoor deal with Donald Trump.

But it’s important to note that Warsh’s line of criticism typically (indeed, almost exclusively) centers around the notion that post-Lehman forward guidance, because it pledged to keep money cheap and abundant in perpetuity, served to suppress volatility, perpetuate unduly loose financial conditions and encourage excessive risk-taking. No one’s asking that from Warsh.

Currently, many market participants are wondering instead about the glaring incongruity between, on the one hand, Warsh’s supposedly steadfast commitment to restoring price stability amid a long-running inflation overshoot and, on the other, his almost petulant refusal to hint at rate hikes.

“Over the past 12 months, 54% of goods and services in the PCE basket showed price increases above 3%,” Warsh said Friday. “This is well below the post-pandemic highs of about 77%, but it remains well above the level of 32% in the two decades that preceded the pandemic.” He continued:

The responsibility for 65 months of sustained, elevated inflation sits squarely with the central bank. And that is where it belongs. Here is my standard: We must be confident that underlying inflation is moving to our objective, clearly and at sufficient speed. Otherwise, we have work to do. That’s our job, our mandate and our charge to keep.

Right. So — and pardon me in advance for the profanity — what’s the f-cking hold up? Why the reluctance even to allude to a rate hike? Why so damn coy?

In the very next sentence of his speech — which was also the last sentence of the concluding paragraph — Warsh said, “I stand here today committed to a discipline, not to a decision.”

In other words: Despite repeated concessions regarding the persistence of a meaningful inflation overshoot that the Fed’s duty-bound to redress, and despite conceding that outside of housing, he’d be “hard pressed to describe broad financial conditions as restrictive,” Warsh isn’t willing to suggest publicly that the Fed’s next move is at least as likely to be a hike as a(nother) hold.

Ostensibly, that reticence is just a reflection of Warsh’s commitment to eschewing over-communication. But color me skeptical. I think he’s using his on-the-record, historical position on forward guidance as an excuse for equivocating, so as not to irritate The White House with direct references to imminent rate hikes.

For their part, markets were back to giving Warsh the benefit of the doubt on Friday. His remarks on inflation were read as hawkish. As such, the speech engineered a sharp bear flattener, reminiscent of the price action following the June FOMC.

As the figure above reminds you, the July FOMC press conference triggered the opposite reaction in the curve, which bear steepened in a sign that Warsh was on the way to squandering whatever credibility he established the prior month.

At 4.34%, twos were 71bps — so, nearly three “hikes” — wide to EFFR on Friday in the wake of Warsh’s speech. Pricing for the September meeting moved as high as 57%.

Warsh bought himself — and, indirectly, Scott Bessent — three weeks in Jackson Hole. But if he doesn’t hike next month against what’ll very likely be the same dissents he faced in July, markets will have little choice but to punish him in true “fool me once” fashion.

As Bloomberg Intelligence’s Ira Jersey put it, “Warsh is starting to back himself into a corner.” If those market-implied odds are meaningfully above 50% on the eve of next month’s FOMC gathering, Warsh will have a choice to make: Hike ahead of the mid-terms or face a market revolt.