WHAT WOULD GREENSPAN OR VOLCKER SAY TODAY? THE FED ORACLE' HAS ANSWERS.

The following information was released by the University of Virginia's Darden Graduate School of Business Administration:

By Lauren Foster

Sticky inflation, risks to the labor market and rising oil prices have put the U.S. Federal Reserve back in the spotlight.

It's not the first time the central bank has faced a mix of pressures: In the late 1970s and early 1980s, for example, Fed chair Paul Volcker confronted runaway inflation, high unemployment, a weak stock market and oil shocks tied to the Iranian Revolution.

What if we could ask Volcker and other policymakers how they would respond today?

That may sound like science fiction, but a new AI tool built by a student at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business does just that. The answers, it turns out, are buried deep in decades of dense transcripts and thousands of pages of Fed history.

Drawing on those records, the "FOMC Oracle" models how Fed chairs from Arthur Burns to Jerome Powell, and even President Trump's nominee to succeed Powell, Kevin Warsh might respond to today's most pressing policy questions.

From Rapper to Vibe Coder

Mickey Fortune, a student in the Executive MBA program (Class of 2026), didn't set out to build an AI tool about the Fed.

"All through high school, I was a rapper," he says a path that led to working as a concert promoter, DJing, a record deal in Australia and international tours.

Alongside his music career, he built a parallel track in marketing at RadTech, the association for ultraviolet and electron beam technologies, where he now serves as chief strategy and operations officer.

He also went back to school and earned a bachelor's degree in electronic media and film/screenwriting.

Then the Covid-19 pandemic hit. "I started to ask myself, 'What do I want to do for the next 20 years?'" Fortune says.

He briefly considered pursuing a Master of Fine Arts before turning to business school.

"When I experienced the case method at Darden, I loved it," he says.

The Oracle Takes Shape

The idea for the FOMC Oracle came during a Global Financial Markets class taught by Frank Warnock, the James C. Wheat, Jr. Professor of Business Administration.

Warnock led the class through an analysis of Powell's first FOMC meeting and press conference in March 2018. "This, from my perspective, is plain vanilla. I'm just translating what to me is as natural as simple addition to an audience (our students) who don't realize how simple it is," he says. "But this year I've pointed my students to the complete transcripts etc. of FOMC meetings, which are made publicly available with a 5+ year lag. It's some amazing text, all available on the Fed's website."

In a discussion about the most recent Fed press conference in March, Warnock noted that Powell unlike many predecessors is not a classically trained economist and might answer policy questions differently than other Fed chairs.

That sparked an idea.

"What if we had a tool that would allow us to answer these questions and see what past Fed chairs would have said?" says Fortune. "How would Paul Volcker, Ben Bernanke or Janet Yellen have answered this question?"

He began building.

Using Anthropic's Claude and decades of Fed archives, Fortune created FOMC Oracle, a tool that simulates how different chairs would respond under today's conditions.

"I've always had lots of ideas," says Fortune, "it's just that now, with Claude and other LLMs, I can create things without having to pay a developer and go through a long product process."

Fortune trained the "voice" of the AI with seven Fed Chairs Jerome Powell, Janet Yellen, Ben Bernanke, Alan Greenspan, Paul Volcker, G. William Miller and Arthur Burns using FOMC meeting transcripts from 1976 to 2020 (the most recent available).

He shared early versions for feedback. Warnock loved the idea encouraged him to expand the model to include presumptive future Fed chair Kevin Warsh.

"It was an iterative process," he says. "It's the same way I approached music. I'd make a minute of a song and send it to the record label and say, 'Hey, what do you think?' And I'd take the feedback and make it better, as opposed to putting all the effort into a four-minute song and only then getting feedback."

Training the Fed's Memory

The model draws on roughly 26,000 pages of Federal Reserve documents, about 13.3 million words spanning transcripts, minutes, testimony, speeches and press conferences from 1936 to 2026.

Fortune also built out a feature called "When History Rhymes," using a much broader set of archival Fed documents going back to 1936 and surfaces analogous moments from past policy cycles.

Users can select a question or pose their own on issues such as inflation, labor markets or recession risk. Then they choose which Fed "panel" will respond.

Letting the Past Speak

So how would past Fed chairs respond to today's conditions?

Asked how the Fed should react to 3.1% core PCE, 4.4% unemployment and rising oil prices, the model produces sharply distinct answers.

The AI persona of Volcker, who crushed runaway inflation in the 1980s, is blunt:

"Three-point-one percent core PCE is unacceptable we're letting inflation expectations drift, and that's exactly how we lost credibility in the 1970s."

Greenspan's AI persona, by contrast, is more measured:

"The confluence of sticky core services inflation and energy price pressures, occurring against a backdrop of what appears to be full employment, suggests we may be approaching an inflection point where preemptive action becomes prudent."

When the Future Speaks

It's one thing to invoke past chairs, but what about looking into the future? How might Warsh respond to a thorny question?

The Darden Report put it to the test: "Oil is up 50% over the past year with a war in the Straits of Hormuz threatening even higher prices. Electricity prices are up 20%. Unemployment is low, around the natural rate. Inflation has been above the Fed's 2% target for over 5 years. The president of the United States is threatening to fire the Fed Chair and replace him with someone who has said he would lower interest rates. What would you do?"

AI Warsh's "hot take":

"The Fed's credibility deficit with the American people matters more than political threats from Washington. We cannot cave to pressure when inflation is already above target."

The tool doesn't just dispense pithy one-liners, however. Users can also read the full analysis behind the answer:

This is exactly the moment that separates real central bankers from political appointees. Oil at these levels, with electricity prices surging 20%, creates a clear and present danger of entrenched inflation expectations becoming unanchored. As I said in my July 2025 CNBC interview, inflation is a choice' and choosing to cut rates into this environment would be monetary malpractice of the highest order. The Fed has spent five years failing to restore price stability, and now faces the ultimate test of its resolve.

The political pressure is irrelevant to the analysis. I've argued my entire career that independent operations in the conduct of monetary policy are essential,' and I meant it. Under my leadership, monetary policy decisions will be based on the data and the analysis, not on Truth Social posts. The president can threaten all he wants the law is clear about Fed governance, and markets know the difference between bluster and actual authority.

Yes, unemployment is near the natural rate, which means we have no room for stimulus-driven overheating. The energy shock we're witnessing could easily trigger the kind of wage-price spiral that defined the 1970s. The Fed's 2020 policy framework already produced significant economic damage' through its misdiagnosis of inflation we cannot repeat that error. While I believe AI will eventually deliver significant disinflationary benefits, those productivity gains take time to materialize, and we cannot bet the farm on future technology solving today's inflation problem.

My inclination is to raise rates by 50 basis points immediately, with clear communication that further tightening will follow until oil-driven inflation pressures demonstrably subside.

So, if you could ask the Fed of the past and future what to do next, what would you ask?

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About the University of Virginia Darden School of Business

The University of Virginia Darden School of Business prepares responsible global leaders through unparalleled transformational learning experiences. Darden's graduate degree programs (Full-Time MBA, Part-Time MBA, Executive MBA, MSBA and Ph.D.) and Executive Education and Lifelong Learning programs offered by the Darden School Foundation set the stage for a lifetime of career advancement and impact. Darden's top-ranked faculty, renowned for teaching excellence, inspires and shapes modern business leadership worldwide through research, thought leadership and business publishing. Darden has Grounds in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the Washington, D.C., area and a global community that includes 20,000 alumni in 90 countries. Darden was established in 1955 at the University of Virginia, a top public university founded by Thomas Jefferson in 1819 in Charlottesville, Virginia.