Page F113From§Eachthe early bird edition — 7 October 2026
As it ran on the front
The minutes came out Wednesday and the line to read twice is the one with unanimously in it. Officials unanimously agreed that inflation was still elevated and had not made much progress toward their 2 percent target in recent months. Most of them expect another rate increase will likely be needed this year.
Two reconciliation terms in that sentence and only one of them carries a figure. Two percent is a figure. Recent months is not a quantity, hon, it is a shrug with a calendar attached. So I went and got the calendar.…
…(cont) Late August. The chair, Kevin Warsh, said the central bank had work to do if underlying inflation was not moving toward 2 percent. That is a conditional. A conditional is what you file when you want the line left open in case the number comes in wrong.
September 11. The number came in and it had not moved: annual inflation unchanged in August, still well above 2 percent, with the war with Iran in it. A hike the following week went from possible to increasingly likely. The president spent that week pushing for cuts.
September 15 and 16. The September meeting opened with the chair in what the trade press called a tricky position: rising expectations of a hike on one side, the president's demands for cuts on the other. Under pressure. That phrase names the direction of the force and leaves out who is applying it.
October 7. Likely, again.
That is three months on the same adverb, and I would like it entered in the record as such, because likely is not a rate. It does not appear in any table I can foot. You cannot carry it forward, you cannot pay a bill with it, and it has now been the answer in three straight filings describing the same gap in the same direction.
I notice the word another, which assumes a first one. The committee is entitled to its own count. I will only note what the filings I have show: elevated in August, elevated in September, elevated in the minutes released Wednesday, the target holding still at 2 percent, the distance to it unstated. The filing names the target and declines to name the distance. In my line of work a gap nobody will measure is called an estimate, and an estimate that stays in the future tense for three months is called a position.
The 2 percent sits in a table. The distance to it sits in somebody's monthly total, and that somebody is not on the committee and is not in the minutes. What is in the minutes, three times now, is the word likely. What is outside them, three times now, is one office asking for the number to go the other way. Both of those are free. The gap is the only part anybody pays for.
“Three months straight they've put out paper saying prices are still too high and something will probably need to be done about it, probably, later. Meanwhile the White House is leaning on the chair to go the other way and make money cheap, and the only thing the two sides agree on is that neither of them is going to eat the difference. I am eating the difference. It's in the rent and it's in the register, and probably is not a number you can bring to either one.”
“Look, likely is responsible forward guidance — that's data dependence, markets need the optionality. Did I say optionality? That doesn't sound like me. The point is it was unanimous, which shows the committee is unified, and the President has been very clear he wants rates lower, and the Fed is completely independent, which is exactly why it's going to get there on its own.”
Earlier in this story
The receipts
NAR puts the median first-time homebuyer at 40 years old - a record - and first-time buyers at a record-low 21% of the market National Association of Realtors, 2025 Profile
Fed officials expect another rate hike will be needed this year: meeting minutesThe officials unanimously agreed that inflation was still elevated and had not made much progress toward their 2% target in recent months, the minutes said.
Most Federal Reserve officials expect that another interest rate increase will likely be needed this year to combat inflation, minutes released Wednesday from the central bank’s most recent meeting showed
· Warsh under pressure as Fed considers rate hike from the morgue, 16 Sep 2026
· Warsh under pressure as Fed weighs rate hike from the morgue, 15 Sep 2026
· Stubborn inflation raises prospect of Fed rate hike from the morgue, 11 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.