At the intersection of economic mandate and political will, Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh faces his first defining test: whether to raise interest rates in defiance of a president who appointed him and who has made his opposition unmistakably clear. The Federal Reserve, born of the conviction that monetary policy must answer to data rather than to power, now embodies that principle in a single vote. How Warsh leads his institution through this moment will speak not only to the future of American monetary policy, but to the enduring question of whether independent institutions can hold thei