Wall Street is on tenterhooks over the Fed’s ‘rare, genuinely suspenseful’ December meeting, because the committee itself doesn’t know what to make of the data—or of one another

Jerome Powell, chairman of the US Federal Reserve (Credit: Al Drago—Bloomberg/Getty Images)

If the market doesn’t seem sure whether or not to expect a base interest rate cut next month, it’s not alone—members of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) themselves may have little clue which way the vote is going to go.

In the run-up to this week, the mood was one of disappointment that the FOMC wouldn’t deliver a final cut for 2025, an action many analysts had priced in since this summer. A week ago, investors hedged their bets at a 50/50 likelihood of a 25bps cut from its current position of 3.75% to 4%.