I don’t get bent out of shape about much. Nor do I care for pretending, even as that’s my “job.”

Not a lot matters. “Life’s too short to sweat the small stuff,” as they say, and guess what? It is all small stuff, particularly when you’re an overprivileged Westerner residing in an advanced economy.

That reality makes it difficult on some days to wield my digital pen in the service of injecting life into the mercurial ups and downs of chart lines. Yes, they represent the waxing and waning of fortunes, but you can’t take it with you. So, who cares? Not me.

But I do a good job of pretending, don’t I? Every day, I force myself to animate the inanimate. Part of that effort entails pretending as though every turn of phrase emanating from this or that macro-market “somebody” piques my interest and should likewise pique yours. This week, those “somebodies” will be Fed officials, who came out of the self-imposed quiet period around the September FOMC meeting ready to talk.

Interested though I’m generally not, I was genuinely (albeit hardly) irked by Austan Goolsbee’s temerity during remarks for a Q&A in Chicago on Monday.

I praised Goolsbee earlier this month for stating the obvious about the Fed, rates and nascent labor market weakness: If you’re really interested in staying ahead of the curve, you have to move preemptively. If you wait around on conclusive evidence, you may not necessarily be behind the curve, but you’re certainly not ahead of it. To the extent that was the rationale for last week’s upsized first rate cut, it was a good one. A good rationale, I mean. Goolsbee reiterated as much on Monday. The Fed, he said, can’t “wait until problems show up.” “If we want a soft landing, we can’t be behind the curve.” So far, so good.

The rest of Goolsbee’s remarks were superfluous at best (given the dot plot) and gratuitous at worst. “Rates need to come down significantly going forward,” he said. It’s time to focus on the labor market, and that “means many more rate cuts over the next year.” Later, he told the moderator that the Fed has “a long way to come down to get rate[s] to something like neutral.” Currently, Fed funds is “hundreds” of basis points above neutral, he added.

I don’t necessarily disagree with any that. But two things. First, there’s no occasion for it. We already have the dot plot. And everyone pretty much knows where Goolsbee stands. What purpose could it possibly serve to trot out official after official after official this week (and if you look at the schedule, that’s what’s coming) to reiterate that the Fed intends to cut rates by a lot over the next 12 months? Are their intentions in that regard somehow unclear?

Second, and more importantly, Goolsbee’s engaged in the same circular logic as Jerome Powell and all the rest. There isn’t a single Fed official — not one — willing to say, definitively, what the neutral rate is. Some will venture a range, most will obfuscate. And yet, every Fed official — all of them — will give you an opinion on whether current policy settings are restrictive, and they’ll generally be willing to use modifiers like “very” and “somewhat” to describe the degree of restriction.

See the problem there? Policy’s “restrictive” (or “loose”) relative to one thing and one thing only: The neutral rate. If you can’t say where neutral is, you don’t know how restrictive policy is, or even if it’s restrictive at all. Period. There’s no way around that. I’m open (very much so) to the idea that this whole discussion is pure, unadulterated gibberish. But as it’s couched in polite academic company, “restrictive” and “loose” are relative to neutral. So, if you can’t say where neutral is, you can’t say whether policy’s restrictive either, let alone with the kind of precision conveyed by modifiers like “very” and “somewhat.”

The balance of evidence — GDP tracking, consumer spending, even the decelerating labor market which is still adding jobs — suggests five-handle Fed funds is only mildly restrictive if it’s restrictive at all. Simply put: Goolsbee has no idea whether policy’s “hundreds” of basis points worth of restrictive, as he asserted on Monday.

Neel Kashkari, despite being less cavalier than Goolsbee, engaged in the same circular reasoning. “We’re still in a net tight position after 50bps,” he told CNBC. “As we go forward, I expect, on balance, we will probably take smaller steps unless the data changes materially.” How does he (Neel) know, with certainty, that the Fed’s “still in a net tight position” if he can’t tell us where neutral is? Spoiler alert: He doesn’t know that. Certainly not with certainty.

Raphael Bostic was on the record Monday too. Inflation has fallen and the labor market has cooled “much more quickly” than Bostic “imagined at the beginning of the summer.” “I envision normalizing monetary policy sooner than I thought would be appropriate even a few months ago,” he said, in a speech.

Again, it’s not that any of this is “wrong,” per se. Rather, the issue is that there’s no way to know if it’s right with anything approaching the kind of certainty that Goolsbee (for example) exhibited when he confidently declared policy “hundreds” of basis points worth of onerous. In order to say that with conviction, you need conviction about the location of the neutral rate. If any Fed officials have that conviction, I’ve yet to hear about it. What I have heard a lot of, though, are admissions that the location of neutral has never been less clear.

This is all about risk management, and specifically about waiting until the balance of accumulated evidence points overwhelmingly in one direction or the other. Note: “Overwhelmingly” is something different from “conclusively.” As emphasized above, you can’t wait on conclusive evidence if you’re the Fed. Waiting for “conclusive” is what got them into trouble with inflation in 2021.

As of the July jobs report (i.e., August 2), the balance of evidence began to favor an aggressive first rate cut. The downward revisions which accompanied the August jobs report (on September 6) tipped the scales. 50 it was, warm CPI or not. Now, a prudent Fed should require additional evidence not so much to assess that rates need to move meaningfully lower over the next 15 months — I don’t think anyone disputes that — but additional evidence before making unsupported claims about the proximity of policy to neutral and certainly before validating the market’s inclination to assume every meeting will be a cut, irrespective of the data.

By “irrespective of the data” I mean that as it stands, markets seem convinced that only an anomalous re-acceleration in headline hiring and/or an unthinkably acute inflation spike would give the Fed pause to consider… well, to consider a “pause.” If you believe the only data with the capacity to alter an otherwise pre-set course for policy is data that’s mathematically impossible (or for all intents and purposes mathematically impossible), then far from believing policy’s data-dependent, you’re convinced it isn’t.

That should trouble Powell, who went out of his way last week to emphasize that policy’s “not on any pre-set course.” Monday’s remarks from Goolsbee sounded a lot like policy’s on cruise control — on “autopilot,” to employ a notorious Powell communications faux pas.

Powell didn’t help his own cause last week. Recall that just half an hour or so after insisting the Fed’s taking a “meeting-by-meeting” approach to setting policy, he answered a question about “the cut at the next meeting” without batting an eye.