… is all around, though in this case not until after the holidays.
The FOMC meeting on Tuesday of next week isn’t expected to produce any major policy decisions (more on which in our next post).
But there will be much talk about what might be done in the first quarter of next year, possibly as soon as the next meeting in January — and by then, Bernanke will find the company more amenable to looser policy, should he choose to pursue it. Non-voting hawkish Fed presidents can still make a lot of noise, of course, but on the FOMC itself the composition will clearly shift the other way.
A chart from SocGen, which mostly reflects our understanding of the members’ positions, though the bank doesn’t share its methodology:
