Can Walmart help the Fed harness real-time U.S. economic data? We're about to find out.

By Greg Robb The Federal Reserve named a former Walmart CEO to a task force to develop contemporaneous data on spending, inflation and growth The Federal Reserve is teaming with a former Walmart CEO in its efforts to better monitor the U.S. economy. Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh on Thursday tapped a former CEO of Walmart to help the U.S. central bank find better ways to keep its finger on the pulse of the U.S. economy. The Fed announced that Doug McMillon, who stepped down in February after 11 years as CEO of Walmart (WMT), would be joining a task force "to improve the quality and timeliness of real economic signals that inform the Federal Reserve's policy judgments." McMillon will be joined on the data task force by two economics professors, Raj Chetty of Harvard University and Kevin Murphy of the University of Chicago, who are experts on income inequality. The three of them will be aided by Fed staff. In a speech earlier this month in Portugal, Warsh said he wanted the Fed within nine to 12 months to be using "new technologies to understand what's happening in the real economy in a contemporaneous, real-time way that positions us, as central bankers, to make better decisions." He said the Fed would then not have to rely solely on U.S. government economic statistics that have "mismeasurement problems." Walmart is America's largest grocer and was ranked the nation's top retailer by the National Retail Federation, with U.S. retail sales of $576 billion last year. Although the data is confidential, Walmart likely already provides a lot of information to U.S. economic statistical agencies, said Omair Sharif, founder and president of Inflation Insights. As such, it makes sense to add someone to the task force who can figure out what data the massive company could provide on a real-time basis, he added - including real-time data on spending, foot traffic and the behavior of different income brackets. But overall, Sharif said he thought the economic-data task force was too "narrow," without any members who have real-world experience in producing or using government data. "This is a missed opportunity," he said. Richard Moody, chief economist at Regions Financial, said the task force might end up making recommendations about improvements to U.S. statistical agencies. He said that "a lot of work" needs to be done to improve government data. Warsh has promised "regime change" at the central bank, and last month said he would set up five new task forces to get the ball rolling. In addition to economic data, the groups will focus the Fed's communications, its $6.7 trillion balance sheet, its inflation framework and how artificial intelligence will impact central-bank policy. The other most recognizable names on the task forces are venture capitalist Marc Andreesen, who will be a member of the Fed's AI task force, and former Bank of England Governor Mervyn King, who will help review how the Fed communicates to the markets and the broader public. -Greg Robb This content was created by MarketWatch, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. MarketWatch is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal. (END) Dow Jones Newswires 07-09-26 1752ET