Stephen Miran, Trump’s new appointee voted for a 1/2 point cut. 
FOMC Statement
Please consider the Federal Reserve FOMC Statement on September 17, 2025.
Recent indicators suggest that growth of economic activity moderated in the first half of the year. Job gains have slowed, and the unemployment rate has edged up but remains low. Inflation has moved up and remains somewhat elevated.
The Committee seeks to achieve maximum employment and inflation at the rate of 2 percent over the longer run. Uncertainty about the economic outlook remains elevated. The Committee is attentive to the risks to both sides of its dual mandate and judges that downside risks to employment have risen.
In support of its goals and in light of the shift in the balance of risks, the Committee decided to lower the target range for the federal funds rate by 1/4 percentage point to 4 to 4‑1/4 percent. In considering additional adjustments to the target range for the federal funds rate, the Committee will carefully assess incoming data, the evolving outlook, and the balance of risks. The Committee will continue reducing its holdings of Treasury securities and agency debt and agency mortgage‑backed securities. The Committee is strongly committed to supporting maximum employment and returning inflation to its 2 percent objective.
In assessing the appropriate stance of monetary policy, the Committee will continue to monitor the implications of incoming information for the economic outlook. The Committee would be prepared to adjust the stance of monetary policy as appropriate if risks emerge that could impede the attainment of the Committee’s goals. The Committee’s assessments will take into account a wide range of information, including readings on labor market conditions, inflation pressures and inflation expectations, and financial and international developments.
Voting for the monetary policy action were Jerome H. Powell, Chair; John C. Williams, Vice Chair; Michael S. Barr; Michelle W. Bowman; Susan M. Collins; Lisa D. Cook; Austan D. Goolsbee; Philip N. Jefferson; Alberto G. Musalem; Jeffrey R. Schmid; and Christopher J. Waller. Voting against this action was Stephen I. Miran, who preferred to lower the target range for the federal funds rate by 1/2 percentage point at this meeting.
Fed governor Stephen Miran was a senior White House adviser until his confirmation to the central bank board this week.
Miran replaced Adriana Kugler as a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors when she unexpectedly resigned in August.
This is Miran’s first meeting. He dissented in favor of a larger half-percentage-point cut.
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Trump fired Lisa Cook but the court intervened. She voted with the overwhelming majority for a quarter-point cut.
It may be worth noting recent international monetary rate decisions (e.g., key interest rates, repo rates, target rate decisions, and others):
September cut by a quarter point: Canada, Indonesia, Peru, Poland
September cut by more than a quarter point: Russia, Turkey
August cut by a quarter point: Philippines, New Zealand, Uruguay, Thailand, Kenya, Australia, Mexico, UK, Moldova, Lesotho
August cut by more than a quarter point: Egypt
2025 Totals: 20 rate hikes, 98 rate cuts
What a slap in the face. Your fired !
–DJT
Is there a single lemming who works for taco that isn’t his lapdog?
Are King Charles and Queen Camilla Trump’s lapdogs ? What kind of dogs are Starmer, Macron and Merz.
Lapdog. Nice dig! Always trying to find a way to put Trump down.
I thought Waller & Bowman were also Trump lackeys?
Let’s see what happens to the labor market once Sept & Oct data are released.
Miran may turn out to be right, a more aggressive 50 BP cut was warranted.
Time will tell.
Go recession go! We want layoffs!!!
No, do I want a recession to happen. However, one may be around the corner. IF this happens, then Miran will turn out to not be Trump’s lapdog.
FYI – Go back & look at inflation right before the NBER declared the GR in December 2007. From Aug to Nov, CPI climbed from 2.0 to 4.3. That’s a whole lot faster than what it’s climbing nowadays.
And unemployment only rose from 4.6 to 4.7 over that same period of time. With 1.7M jobs having just gone up in smoke, rising unemployment & inflation, do you think a recession is more or less likely in the next six months?
I say six months because one thing is extremely obvious. $5.7T in deficit spending over last three years is very anti-recessionary, so our current move towards a recession has been stretched out.
FYI – how much was the FY2006 deficit ending Sept 2007, right as the Fed started to cut rates?
Try $248B which is peanuts compared to what’s about to be reported for FY2025, > $2T.
The Fed cut rate to ease gov debt payments. 1/4 point cut isn’t good enough.
Rates below the cpi, negative rates are even better. They will reduce debt faster. As long as the cpi will not accelerate that’s fine by JP.
But that’s the problem. If the labor market doesn’t rollover towards recession levels, then core inflation, for example, is going to continue to rise, possibly as high as 3.5% by early next year from its current 3.1%.
And the labor market will have to really start to approach recessionary levels for the Fed to reduce the FFR another 100 BP to get it below inflation.
And I do think it’s funny that Mish is so quick to place the lapdog moniker on Miran when there’s easily a 50/50 chance we move towards real recessionary indicators before the end of the year.
So far, intermittent mfg/suppliers absorbed tariffs. Inflation might rise, for
whatever reasons, but we don’t know when and why. If SPX rises to 7K there will be no more rate cuts. If it will tests Apr lows the Fed will cont to cut. The Fed will stay put, unless inflation risk accelerates. JP will not allow two negative GDP before he retires. So far the labor market looks anemic. Trump and JP are buying time until new “completed” factories will start hiring. We don’t know if they will make money. All we know that trillions are pouring into several essential sectors and tax cuts are tail winds. Demand for highly skilled workers might increase inflation. Higher wages ease the pain of tariffs, but not for all.
One hit of heroin good for the addict, one more even better. Giving the federal government cheap debt is like giving an addict heroin, it merely delays the reckoning from their addiction, and makes that addiction worse. Notably spendthrift Trump has a severe case of addiction.
Lower rates, tariffs, higher tax collection and a smaller gov will fill gov coffer.
With that money Trump can cut debt by at least a 1/3, or inject Hakeem with heroin.
so in effect tax more and spend more while taking government stakes in companies, and running trillion dollar+ deficits? With bigger moobs he could be AOC.
Moobs are actually about the same size. Just look better on AOC.
Of course! It puts irresponsible borrowers further in the hole by giving incentives to take on more debt. Given the massive consumer debt, a rate increase may have been appropriate. I noticed the bellwether 10 year is rising in yield, so much for mortgage relief if this continues.
Didn’t you criticize both Mish and Wolf very recently for predicting a Fed 1/4 point cut?
I haven’t seen your retraction or apology yet.
Politicians blame the fed when actually their spending caused the problem to begin with.
bessent wants to be fed governor.
At 3:34PM QQQ and SPY a Hanging Man at the top.
Treasury Secretary Bessent says Fed ‘must change course,’ demands an entire review
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Friday called for renewed scrutiny of the Federal Reserve, including its power to set interest rates, as the Trump administration intensifies its efforts to exert control over a central bank whose insulation from short-term political pressures is widely seen as key to effective control of inflation.
“There must also be an honest, independent, nonpartisan review of the entire institution, including monetary policy, regulation, communications, staffing and research,” Bessent wrote in the Wall Street Journal, also calling for the Fed to leave bank supervision to other governmental authorities and to “scale back the distortions it causes in the economy,” including by bond purchases made outside of true crisis conditions.
“The Fed must change course,” he said in a longer piece published in The International Economy that excoriated the Fed for policies he said helped feed inflation, enriched the rich at the expense of the poor, and exacerbated the housing affordability crisis.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent with President Trump on Friday. “There must also be an honest, independent, nonpartisan review of the entire institution, including monetary policy, regulation, communications, staffing and research,” Bessent wrote in the Wall Street Journal.
He also accused the central bank of partisanship and misusing public funds for everything from a renovation of its headquarters to its police force, amplifying charges made by Fed critics within and outside of the Trump administration that the Fed has argued don’t reflect the facts.
Bessent’s barrage of criticism – which he characterized as a bid to restore the Fed’s independence – came as he began a series of interviews on Friday in search of candidates to replace Fed Chair Jerome Powell, whose term ends in May, a source familiar with the process said. It was not immediately clear who would be interviewed.
President Trump has been unhappy with Powell since shortly after making him Fed chair in 2018, and all this year has ratcheted up the pressure on the Fed to lower rates and has moved to install allies at the central bank who will push for cuts.
Last week he said he was removing Fed Governor Lisa Cook over allegations of mortgage fraud, which Cook says are unfounded; Cook is suing to stop the firing and remains in her job for now.
Last week, Trump said he was removing Fed Governor Lisa Cook over allegations of mortgage fraud, which Cook says are unfounded.
Trump’s nominee to fill an open seat at the Fed, Stephen Miran, said at his nomination hearing this week that he’ll take unpaid leave from his job as White House economic advisor while he does the Fed job, a situation that Democrats say impugns his ability to make monetary policy decisions independently of the president.
The White House has previously indicated that the list of potential Powell successors includes National Economic Council director Kevin Hassett and former Fed Governor Kevin Warsh along with current Fed Governor Christopher Waller.
Bessent began a series of interviews on Friday in search of candidates to replace Fed Chair Jerome Powell, whose term ends in May, sources said.
Some of Bessent’s criticisms echo those of the Fed chair candidates; Warsh, for instance, has long called for “regime change” at the Fed.
83
The Fed’s Waller was one of two Fed governors to dissent against the Fed’s decision in July not to cut interest rates.
The Fed does look set to kick off a series of reductions this month to shore up an increasingly fragile labor market, though no current policymakers have signaled support for the kind of deep rate cuts that Trump has demanded or the wholesale remaking of the Fed that Bessent is now advocating.
I want to remind everyone that the FED rate is the interbank lending rate which the banks don’t have to honor when loaning to each other. Matter of fact – lending rates on short term loans with treasuries as collateral can often be above or below the FED rate depending upon liquidity constraints. Why does this make sense? It is the market that sets rates not the FED; they only follow the market. Whenever the market gets manipulated the results are sub par. Since everyone thinks the FED controls the interest rate market, what would happen if treasury tried to control the interest rates? The same thing-short term hits and missteps with sub par results.
Quite true. In fact the Fed doesn’t directly set the federal funds rate. It attempts to influence the market by setting rates it does control: the discount and repo rates and the interest it pays on bank reserves. Those rates only matter when times get rough and liquidity drops. When times are good and liquidity is high, the fed is just forced to follow the market down. The problem comes in when the Fed starts artificially creating liquidity, like it did in 2008 after Greenspan deregulated banks and caused the housing crash or 2021 when Trump decided to hand out free money to the ignorant masses.
Trump will take a victory lap and his supporters will be high fiving, not realizing the cut is in response to overall economic weakness and the super weak dollar.
He voted for a half a point? A measly 1/2 point? Trump’s lap dog? Trump is going to sick Kristi Noem on that untrainable puppy.
LOL US rates have begun to surge already while the US dollar is reaching new lows. That was fast.
I was about to agree with you before realizing that US rates are down across the board since the market priced in the current cut 2-3 weeks ago. So really this is just the sell-the-news moment.
The USD vs. other currencies is back to 2022 levels, well within historical range, and lower USD is necessary to rebalance global trade.
KUDOS FED. Perfect timing. The rate-of-change in monetary flows, the proxy for R-gDp, is now falling.
And some nice selling of the ten year. Mortgage relief?
Given Trump was elected in 2024. I am now starting a 40 year sequel to 1984….
I’m still slightly optimistic that America will survive this assault on democracy. But I expect it will take a decade or more to recover from the damage already done. We still have more than 3 years of potential damage yet… I’m just hoping that the the press and the courts survive, because right now they are both looking under threat.
The threat posed by current American politics transcends Republicans VS Democrats and Liberal VS Conservatives. American democracy is at stake here.
LOL, the press died about 15 years ago.
The advertising-supported click-bait factories that dominate the current media environment are demonstrably not accurate reporters.
In addition, government propaganda against the U.S. population has been legalized.
This outbreak of “narrative projection” is a big part of why democracy is in danger.
We can’t trust any information presented by those who frequently conceal pertinent facts.
There is no one to trust except your own eyes and ears. But most of us don’t have the time or mental energy to do our own due diligence and get to the truth.
The media gives us whatever drums up the biggest audience so they can sell ads. Nothing else is important to media companies, that’s how they do right by their shareholders. Name one thing that matters other than those two things, if those two things are working perfectly. Honesty? Accuracy? Those are never coming back to the media unless the customers refuse to watch or click anything else other than honest, factual news. This is an unassailable point and I hate being an absolutist.
This is why Penske Media, which publishes rags like Rolling Stone, Billboard and others is suing Google for their AI Summary section they have added to their search results.
They claim that the content of the summary is enough to keep people from clicking through to the websites, causing them to lose revenues.
In other words, we can’t show ads to people if they don’t come to our websites and this is YOUR fault, Google!
We agree for a change!
Although, I think honesty and accuracy do matter in the long run – the media that have lost the most credibility have also lost the most viewership and are in dire financial straits.
A lot of people are hungry for honest reporting. But despite the existence of a market for honest, factual news, there are few if any such sources!
I agree that the press has suffered long before Trump. I’ve seen this in the USA and overseas. This is largely due to influences not directly implemented by government, eg social media and tabloid trends in mainstream press.
However in most western democracies they have still have a surviving mainstream press that isn’t threatened by their government. The same cannot be said in the US at present.
For what it is worth, and possibly stating the obvious. I think the rise of Trump and the tolerance of his behaviour is a backlash against the BS of the Liberals and the Left. The Democrats and the left in general need a good hard look at themselves too.
(For context I’m somewhat ‘Liberal’. But I abhor the woke politics and that has pushed me away from liberal narratives. But the Trump narrative is a threat to Democracy.
Oh and I’ve followed Mish for almost 2 decades. I don’t always agree but the fact that I have kept coming back speaks volumes)
On the contrary, I think most of the western democracies are in even worse shape in terms of freedom of the press.
Widespread reports of media suppression in Britain, Germany, France, Sweden…
Maybe the reason why it doesn’t look like their mainstream press is “threatened” by their government is because their mainstream press is already co-opted. Don’t need to be directly controlled provided they all are managed by a single narrow elite with limited perspective.
the press died on 9.11.01. after which they imbedded reporters in military units to do nothing but lick colons or MIC. thank you for your service pablum
Did you forget when this happened during WW2, Vietnam, and Korea or are you just dumb?
Joe Rosenthal!
The move is not enough to make a huge impact, but should they make this a routine it could. Dollar on DXY is up a bit which to me is strange. Maybe currency markets were looking for a larger cut.
Economic theory suggests the dollar should rise and fall based on relative interest rates, therefore lower interest rates should cause the dollar to fall. But the dollar actually rises and falls with the US’ economic performance, with lower interest rates suggesting higher economic performance therefore a higher dollar. The US is special due to the dollar being the international reserve currency and the US being a significant destination for international investment.
No discussion here. Just hate on the Thump as US teetering on Depression according to the latest BLS BS of negative revisions with much, more trending and demand destruction across the board.
Won’t argue that rate cuts won’t help. But, Biden and Fed claimed US was going great two months before the election. Then, the BLS 2.3 million employees claimed the Biden era numbers were a million or more over stated. Oh my. And, now they are all victims of the Thump.
Oh no, a dissent!
US stock market is not happy.
Ah yes you must be a bear… perhaps of the permanent kind. We are at all time highs and the market seems to have digested this pretty well. What’s your evidence the market isn’t happy, on a time scale larger than a 30 minute chart?
The market will continue to be great far past the way too late point because they’re lemmings. They see no cliff, everything is fine, number keeps going up! A bad barometer if there ever was one.
If you have $20 million to invest, where are you going to put it instead of the stock market? Real estate? Precious metals? Cash? Each has a downside far worse than temporary drops in stocks. Cash is a guaranteed loss to inflation. Real estate is a guaranteed short and medium term loss, and gold is a guaranteed short term loss simply because of a lack of easy liquidity. Stocks have a terrific return over the years except during a few relatively short time frames.
Fido voted for only 50 bip cut? Bad dog! Master wants ZERO OR LESS!
Remember this?-
https://x.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1171735691769929728
Your comment brings a Frank Zappa flavour to the discourse. Carry on.
Yes Bubba – go recession go!