Neil Irwin

One dissenter was Stephen Myron, who's a governor appointed by President Trump just a couple of months ago.

He wants even more rate cuts.

So he has embraced the Trump line that rates seem to be a lot lower, that the economy can really benefit from it and it won't cause an inflation problem.

So he wanted to cut interest rates a half percentage point, go more aggressively than the rest of his colleagues did.

The two dissenters on the other side were Chicago Fed President Austin Goolsbee, Kansas City Fed President Jeff Schmidt.

They both wanted to leave rates where they are.

They think that inflation is still too much of a problem, that they're really playing with fire if they cut rates now and ignore the kind of elevated inflation that we keep having year after year after year.

There are also some shadow dissenters.

What do I mean by that?

So the Fed releases these projections four times a year, and it includes dots on what each official thinks the rates ought to be over the next couple of years.

And if you count up those dots, and people like me have a lot of fun counting up these dots one by one,

There were actually six officials out of the 19 who thought it would make sense to leave interest rates where they are.

That means that in addition to the two people who actually dissented, there's probably four more officials who, in their heart, kind of wanted to dissent, maybe didn't have a vote this cycle.

And so there is some real disagreement within this committee of what interest rates ought to look like right now.

I feel like a thing we've seen with President Trump is he will never take the win.

You know, he wants rates a lot lower and he's getting them.

He's gotten three rate cuts this year, but it's still not enough.

He was just yesterday, just in the last, you know, since the meeting, he's been saying that rates should be cut much more.

You know, that said, because of these dissents and shadow dissents that we talked about, I think it's going to be a hard slog to persuade these officials that in a time of 3% inflation, which is still higher than they want, that there should be significantly cheaper money.

So here's the central problem, and this is a disconnect between the way economists think of these policy levers and the way laymen and kind of ordinary people do.