Nick Timiraos

What people are talking about is the existing branches of government agreeing to this relationship that we should not have direct political control over monetary policy because the long run interest of the economy and the short run interest of politicians don't always sync up.

And so what's at stake here isn't just the end of kind of this generic Fed independence.

What's at stake is, can this president have much greater control over monetary policy?

The big question really for this meeting is, where does it leave everybody on the rate setting committee in thinking about another interest rate cut in December?

Because if we go back to their previous meeting in September,

They released quarterly economic projections then.

And you had a narrow majority of the 19 people who fill out these projections who thought they would cut rates three times before the end of the year.

And there were only three meetings left back in September.

So that would imply a cut this week and another cut in December.

But you had a significant minority of officials who didn't think any more rate cuts were going to be needed.

Now, normally, when there's this kind of a divide,

the economic data come along and they kind of reconcile the debate.

They help the people who were not comfortable with cutting get more comfortable with a cut or vice versa.

But, Caitlin, because of the government shutdown, the Fed has been robbed, really, of the information that would help reconcile this debate.

And so that's why this is a weird situation where it's going to be harder for the Fed to have a view about

what you're going to do in December because you won't have had the data that sort of guide you towards wherever that consensus is forming.

The Fed has a view as to how the economy is performing.

And you're using whatever data you have, whether it's the higher quality government data or sort of the second and third tier private statistics or just anecdote.

You're using that to sort of gut check your hypothesis about what's happening in the economy.

The answer for December is really there's inertia built into these processes.