Fed funds rate after Oct 2026 meeting?

Waller: “I anticipate additional hikes to support a timelier return of inflation to our 2% goal. But there is some flexibility about when those hikes will occur. The hikes do not need to come at consecutive meetings, but they should be in place in an acceptable period of time.”

Fed minutes: “With regard to the outlook for monetary policy beyond the current meeting, most participants assessed that another increase in the target range for the federal funds rate would likely be appropriate by year end.” https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/fomcminutes20260916.htm

We have posted the minutes from the #FOMC meeting held September 15-16, 2026: https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/monetary20261007a.htm

Our September 2026 Survey of Consumer Expectations shows that households’ inflation expectations increased at the short- and medium-term horizons and remained unchanged at the longer-term horizon. Labor market expectations mostly improved with unemployment rate, job finding, job loss, and quit expectations all improving.

New from the New York Fed: "By February 2026, tariffs had contributed 2.9 pp to goods price inflation, and without them goods prices would have fallen slightly." About one quarter of every point in higher tariff rates shows up in consumer prices within one year. • A 10% across-the-board tariff yields a 2.6% rise in consumer goods prices after one year. • About two thirds of the increase comes from pricier imports, which get passed through quickly. • Another third comes from U.S. made goods, as producers face higher input costs and less import competition. This takes longer, about 6-12 months, to filter through.

Dallas Fed President Lorie Logan says the Fed likely will need to raise rates by at least another 50 bps to ensure inflation doesn’t settle above the central bank’s 2% goal. Logan said those additional increases, together with September’s, would merely reverse the three cuts the Fed made last year. She said the Fed needs to set interest rates at a modestly restrictive level, a threshold that remains uncertain and could require even more increases. Logan drew a distinction on the run-up in bond yields. To the extent higher Treasury yields reflect expectations of a more aggressive Fed, those increases “don’t do our work for us,” she said. But if the increase in yields is driven by rising term premiums, or the extra compensation investors demand to hold longer-term debt, the moves “can slow the economy, reducing the need to tighten monetary policy.”

Trump says in his Time magazine interview the Fed's interest rate policies are hurting the U.S. "more than inflation is hurting our country." On why it has been so difficult to slow the rise in the debt: "I don't want to tell you what those means are, but you can pay off the debt through other means." "Certain levels of inflation will also pay off that debt very rapidly. Very rapidly."