A few Fed officials struck a cautious tone. Chicago Fed Austan Goolsbee sees the underlying economy “growing pretty solidly”, while Dallas Fed Lorie Logan argued that there is “relatively little room to make additional rate cuts” as she infers from “persistent inflation, resilient demand and modest labor market slack” that policy is “only modestly restrictive”.
On the data front, the euro area unemployment rate nudged up to 6.3% in August (+0.1pp). With today’s release of the U.S. September labor market report likely to be suspended due to the government’s shutdown, the Chicago Fed’s real-time forecast suggests that the unemployment rate was 4.3% in September (the same as in August).
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