On December 6, during remarks for an event hosted by the Missouri Bankers Association, Michelle Bowman advised caution on additional rate cuts.

“I continue to see greater risks to the price stability side of our mandate,” she told the audience, noting that despite rising back near a cycle high in the last BLS release, the jobless rate in the US is still indicative of something very close to full employment.

That wasn’t all she said. Bowman also questioned the contention, popular among some of her colleagues, including and especially Jerome Powell, that current policy settings can properly be described as “restrictive, what with growth running above-trend amid robust consumption powered, in part anyway, by the vaunted “wealth effect.”

“It’s hard to think that the level of interest rates is restrictive at this point,” she mused.

Yes, it is indeed “hard to think that” on some days. Days when, for example, Bitcoin rallies north of $100,000 to within striking distance of a 911 Carrera and equities are minting money like it’s the late 90s.

You’ve all seen the figure below by now. It’s a Chicago Fed gauge of national financial conditions. I’ve updated it with the latest readings, current through — ironically — the date of the Bowman speech quoted above.

Positive values are historically associated with tighter-than-average financial conditions and negative values with looser-than-average financial conditions. Simply put: Financial conditions on one of the Fed’s own metrics have almost never been easier.

In an article which served as his de facto December FOMC preview, Wall Street Journal “Fed whisperer” Nick Timiraos “confirmed” that Powell is, in fact, having a more difficult time herding cats these days amid still-strong data and still-sticky core inflation.

Powell, Nick said, “faces misgivings from some colleagues and less conviction from others.” The new SEP and dots, Timiraos suggested, may “strongly hint that the central bank is ready to go more slowly on the reductions.”

For what it’s worth, Goldman’s Jan Hatzius has now dropped a January cut from the bank’s Fed outlook. “We had kept a January cut in our forecast because we had expected the Fed leadership would want to see a more convincing stabilization in the labor market than we have seen so far [b]ut comments from Fed officials have pointed clearly to a desire to slow the pace soon,” the bank’s David Mericle wrote, in a note dated December 15.

Recall that my own FOMC preview included a fairly lengthy discussion around the neutral rate, and specifically the likelihood that at least in the near-term, it may not be too far away from where policy would sit assuming another cut on Wednesday.

Specifically, I asked if it was “implausible to suggest that near-term, nominal neutral’s 1ppt higher than the median Fed official’s longer run dot.” Then I answered by own question: “I don’t think so.” The implication: Nominal neutral could be around 4%. If that’s more or less accurate, additional cuts would mean policy isn’t restrictive at all.

The figure above, from Goldman’s note, gives you some additional context for my contention. It shows various models of the neutral rate, as well as a market proxy.

“Some FOMC participants increasingly appear to be even more open-minded about rethinking the neutral rate and less anchored on last cycle’s conventional wisdom about neutral than we had expected,” Goldman’s Mericle went on to say, noting that both market pricing and econometric model estimates point “considerably higher than the FOMC’s median estimate,” where “considerably higher” means a range between 2.8% and 4.6%, with an average of 3.8% — so, bang on my suggestion from Sunday.

For their part, Goldman still expects additional cuts in March, June and September. I’m skeptical. My guess is that when Powell says, this week, as he’s almost guaranteed to do, that policy will be decided on a “meeting-by-meeting” basis going forward, he’ll mean exactly that.