Bland. Measured. Patient. Calm. Xanax.

Those are all words you might toss around while describing Jerome Powell’s press conference on Wednesday.

If he didn’t have any benzodiazepines in his system to help take the edge off what could’ve been an arduous repartee with reporters, Powell’s a better Stoic than me.

The post-FOMC Q&A went well, particularly under the circumstances. The press corps did its part by not demanding too much of Powell in terms of questions about Donald Trump’s brazen efforts to remake the Fed in the image of MAGA’s aggressive economic populism.

Wall Street Journal “Fed whisperer” Nick Timiraos wondered if economic conditions in the US still warrant restrictive policy a nod, perhaps, to the fact that the new dot plot, however dovish for the remainder of 2025, suggests rates will remain moderately restrictive through next year. Powell obfuscated and emphasized Wednesday’s cut was another step towards neutral.

Asked by Timiraos how seriously a 50bps cut was considered at the September meeting, Powell essentially said it wasn’t. Considered. “There wasn’t widespread support at all” for an upsized cut, he said. Stephen Miran, then, wasn’t anywhere close to convincing Chris Waller and Miki Bowman.

In response to a question from The New York Times‘s Colby Smith, Powell described Wednesday’s decision as a “risk management cut,” a characterization which appeared to undermine equities. Perhaps sensing he’d said something “wrong,” Powell quickly noted that the labor market’s “really cooling off.” The Fed remains committed to returning inflation to 2%, but since April, upside risks to inflation have lessened “a little,” he said.

Bloomberg’s Michael McKee impolitely pointed out that the Fed keeps projecting a return to 2% inflation but never gets there. Is that, perhaps, evidence that 2% isn’t attainable, he wondered. “We don’t know where the economy will be in three years,” Powell responded. “The nature of the [SEP] exercise is to write down policy that you think will return inflation to [target] over the [forecast] horizon.”

CNBC’s Steve Liesman used his time to ask if, the lower 2025 dot notwithstanding, the Fed’s still taking a meeting-to-meeting approach. Powell suggested “meeting-by-meeting” is in fact the best way to describe the Fed’s current mode. The SEP’s not a plan, he said, adding that the dot math was a close call between tipping two more cuts this year versus just one.

Liesman followed up on that latter point. “Is the dispersion in the outlook a sign of uncertainty?” he wondered. The risks, Powell said, are two-sided, which means “there’s no risk-free path.”

Politico ‘s Victoria Guida asked about Trump. Because someone had to. “As markets have questions about what exactly President Trump’s intentions are with the Fed, what would you point to as the things they should be watching to determine that the Fed is still making decisions based on the economic outlook rather than political considerations?” she asked.

“Look, it’s deeply in our culture to do our work based on the incoming data and never consider anything else. That’s just — everybody at the Fed really feels strongly about that,” Powell said, adding,

So, you know, you’ll know it by the way we talk about what we’re doing, by the speeches that people give, by the decisions that we make. We don’t frame these decisions at all or see them in terms of political outcomes. When you get to another part of Washington, everything is seen through the lens of does it help or hurt this political party or this politician. I think people find it hard to believe that that’s just not at all how we think about things.

Asked by Guida if Lisa Cook’s lawsuit against Trump is “related to questions about Fed independence,” Powell said it’s a court case and as such it’d be “inappropriate” for him to comment.