Nerds like me live for Fed Week. That’s the magical week, eight times a year, when the Federal Reserve announces its interest rate policy.

That’s exciting enough on its own (really, I swear), but it’s also an opportunity for reporters, economists and other Fed watchers to get insight into what the central bank thinks about the state of the American economy. There’s a new head central banker in charge, Kevin Warsh, so tomorrow’s comments will be especially interesting.

In today’s newsletter, we’ll look at this relatively new tradition. Plus, two interesting insights in the job market facing America’s youngest workers. Thanks for reading!  — Tony Wagner, newsletter editor

The FOMC first decided to publish statements after their scheduled meetings in 1994, according to Tom Laarits, a finance professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business.

Back then, Alan Greenspan was the Fed chair.

“I just pulled up a random statement: April 18, 1994, Chairman Greenspan announced today that the Federal Reserve will increase slightly the degree of pressure on reserve positions. This action is expected to be associated with a small increase in short-term money market interest rates. End of statement,” read Laarits.

Not too much to go on, right?

But that was the more or less the norm, until the 2008 financial crisis. Ben Bernanke was the Fed Chair, and the central bank implemented a bunch of tools it never had before to keep the financial system afloat. They also lowered interest rates to near-zero.

“Bernanke, as chair, said, ‘I need to explain what we're doing, so that markets can adjust, businesses can adjust, so everybody can know what we're going to do going forward, because they know we can't lower rates,’” said Sarah Binder at the Brookings Institution.

The name for this is “forward guidance.”

In 2011, Bernanke started holding press conferences, but at every other meeting — basically four per year.

“One thing that happened immediately is the meetings without press conferences came to be observed by market participants as less important, less active, less live,” Laarits said.

Janet Yellen more or less followed in Bernanke’s shoes. But when she passed the torch to Jay Powell, there was a change. Starting in 2019, he held a presser after every policy meeting.

“By making every meeting live, you're getting yourself into giving a lot more forward guidance, so a lot more guidance about how interest rates are going to unfold in the future,” said Kunal Sangani, professor of economics at Northwestern University. “One of the trade-offs of that is you know that forward guidance could turn into forward handcuffs.”

Chair Warsh hasn’t formally announced how many conferences he’ll hold.

“I think it's an open question whether eight press conferences a year is the right amount, or whether scaling back would do the job, while not, sort of, impeding the ability of the Fed to react quickly and still make policies and policy decisions on a short horizon,” said Sangani.

“We're dancing around the big question: How does Warsh want and envision leading the Fed, and with what consequences for the president, for his relationship with Congress, and obviously for how markets interpret what the Fed's going to do?” Binder said.

We’ll see which path he opts for tomorrow.

This is the hardest summer job market teens have faced for several generations. That’s according to outplacement firm Challenger, Grey and Christmas, which reported companies’ overall hiring plans were down 13% from last year — but planned seasonal leisure and hospitality hiring was down 70%. We talked with some teens having a bummer summer on the job market.

Birmingham, Alabama topped payroll processor ADP’s annual list of best U.S. metro areas for young college graduates. The city was in fifth place last year, and beat out the competition for striking the right balance between cost of living, hiring rates for recent grads and median wages. In Birmingham, pay is up 16% in the past year. We talked with officials and young professionals there about why it’s such a great city after college.