There was one overarching takeaway from Jerome Powell’s press conference on Wednesday afternoon in the US: A rate cut at the December FOMC meeting isn’t a foregone conclusion.

He was insistent on that. And I do mean insistent, with emphasis. In fact, Powell went out of his way to draw a distinction between his boilerplate “meeting-by-meeting” talking point and the message he set about delivering on Wednesday. Officials expressed “strongly different views” this week about the appropriate path of policy looking out to year-end, he said.

When Wall Street Journal “Fed whisperer” Nick Timiraos asked if he was “uncomfortable” with the degree of certainty inherent in market pricing for a rate cut in December” Powell all but said “yes.” “We haven’t made a decision about December,” he emphasized.

When a reporter asked about the nature of the arguments brought up at this week’s meeting, Powell reiterated that the Fed’s goals are either in tension currently or very close to it, with the risks to inflation on the upside and risks to the labor market on the downside.

“People have different forecasts and different levels of risk aversion,” he said. “You put that together — there are very disparate views.” December’s not a lock for another cut, he went on, “far from from it.”

In the normal course of business, Powell wouldn’t use that sort of language, nor adopt the kind of definitive cadence he employed while hammering home the point. He did clarify, in response to a question from Steve Liesman, that there was broad support for today’s cut, but again and again he returned to the question of December — even when he wasn’t directly asked.

With the possible exception of August 2022, when Powell was compelled to deliver an overtly stern Jackson Hole address to disabuse markets of the notion that the Fed wasn’t serious about sticking with rate hikes to curb inflation, I’m not sure I’ve ever heard Powell push back on market pricing as hard as he did on Wednesday.

Of course, pressure from The White House will be unrelenting. A Fed that doesn’t keep cutting is a Fed that risks Donald Trump’s ire, but that’s nothing new for Powell who’s on his way out the door anyway. I’m obliged to remind readers that part and parcel of 2018’s egregious holiday slump for US stocks was an obstinate Fed at loggerheads with Trump. Then, as now, Trump was also embroiled in a bitter dispute with Democrats which resulted in a government shutdown.

My guess is that circumstances end up warranting a cut in December anyway, which is to say I think this’ll likely work itself out. But if it doesn’t, and if hawks like Jeffrey Schmid win the day over the shrill objections of the Trump camp, it’s going to be a problem. For Trump at first and then, very quickly, for Powell, who’d be forced to contend with public derision not only from Trump, but also from a “shadow Fed Chair” Trump’s set to select by year-end.

Queried by The New York Times‘s Colby Smith about the lack of government data during the shutdown, Powell said that thanks to private sector releases and Fed surveys the Committee would likely be able to pick up on any “significant change in the economy” even without the benefit of reports from the BLS and BEA.

When Howard Schneider wondered if the Fed’s worried that relying on alternative data will amount to “mak[ing] policy by anecdote,” Powell said the shutdown’s “a temporary state of affairs” even as he readily conceded the data blackout could impact the December policy decision. “What do you do when you’re driving in the fog?” he asked Schneider. “The data may come back. But it’s certainly a possibility that you might say ‘We really can’t see so let’s slow down.'”