Fed Watch – 10/10/2025

with lauren saidel-baker

WEEKLY FED WATCH

This week on Fed Watch, Lauren Saidel-Baker explains how the ongoing government shutdown is limiting critical economic data and how ITR Economics is turning to alternative sources to stay informed. She also reviews the Fed’s latest meeting minutes and early discussions about who might replace Chair Powell.

Key Episode Takeaways

  • 00:08 – Government shutdown impact on economic data
  • 01:17 – Fed minutes and monetary policy outlook
  • 01:53 – Early signs about the next Fed Chair
  • 02:17 – Looking ahead and continued monitoring
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There are still other indicators to be watching, so we're going to keep doing that as long as this shutdown lasts. – Lauren Saidel-Baker Share on X
It's not just that when this government restarts, when we fire it back up, that all of our missing data releases will necessarily come out. - Lauren Saidel-Baker Share on X

The below transcript is a literal translation of the podcast audio that has been machine generated by Notta.

Hi, I’m Lauren Saidel-Baker, and thank you so much for joining me for this October 10th edition of Fed Watch.

We are now 10 days into the shutdown, so there is not too much data coming out. We are following what we can, and of course, finding other indicators, other data sources, wherever we can look for them. I would encourage you to head over to our blog, we’ve written a little bit about how we are continuing to do economics in this little bit of a void, but as we spoke about last week, there are still other factors out there. There are still other indicators to be watching, so we’re going to keep doing that as long as this shutdown lasts. And then when it finally does eventually end, it will end sooner or later, we might still have a little bit of a void in terms of data to catch up on.

So it’s not just that when this government restarts, when we fire it back up, that all of our missing data releases will necessarily come out. In some cases, the work is not being done to collect that data, analyze the data, package it up for distribution, so we might have some amount of lag time before we get everything out there. We’ll keep you updated, and we will be watching, of course, as the days move forward.

But beyond that, a little bit of news out of the Fed this week. First of all, we got the minutes released from that last meeting, and not too much groundbreaking beneath the surface. But it was interesting within those minutes to see that there’s general agreement that rates needed to be cut in the September meeting. But the path going forward, that’s where we start to see a little bit of daylight between these members of the Fed. At this point, there was only one dissent in the September meeting. But what is that future path? It seems like the outcomes might be a little bit disparate. Again, this is no real surprise.

And also this week, we started to hear that there are interviews going on with various contenders, various candidates for that future Fed share position to replace Powell. So again, we don’t know exactly what’s coming out of those meetings or what’s being said in those interviews, but we can say at this point, the next Fed share is likely to be a bit more dovish than the current one.

We’ll be back next week. Fingers crossed for that government to start running again, getting us that data that we need. But we hope you’ll stay right here with us at ITR Economics Fed Watch. Take care.