First thing Wednesday morning, I read an amusing tidbit on Wall Street Fed forecasting.

By Wednesday afternoon, I’d already forgotten where I read it, which speaks to the aging process. Or to Klonopin. Both. It speaks to both.

The gist of it — of the tidbit — was that the Street, considered as a whole, is now thoroughly confused as to the likely path of US monetary policy. I suppose Kevin Warsh, given his disdain for forward guidance, would call that a kind of early success.

The bewilderment’s evident in the lack of uniformity across house Fed calls. Consider this: Citi expects two rate cuts this year from Warsh and a third in January of 2027, while BofA sees three rate hikes from the very same panel of Warsh-led technocrats.

Even if you don’t say as much, your opinion on this depends in large part on whether you think Warsh is, as he put it while denying any direct role for The White House in monetary policy, a “sock puppet.”

If you think he is — a puppet — you expect cuts. If you take him at his word that policy choices will be made in the best interests not of Donald Trump’s political career, but rather of the American public, you expect hikes. Because inflation, as BofA put it in their rationale, is “just bad.”

“The Fed’s inflation problem has gotten unambiguously worse,” the bank’s Aditya Bhave said, explaining the new house call for a trio of hikes. “The Fed was willing to look through the tariffs, but it is losing patience after the latest round of supply shocks [and] housing-driven disinflation has now mostly run its course, while other core services remain very sticky.”

The figure on the left, above, shows you the core PCE breakdown. The figure on the right, which I think’s useful, although you could probably make it yourself if you listen to enough Fedspeak, gives you an idea about whose dot was (probably) whose last week.

According to BofA’s best guess, five of the nine dots tipping hikes in 2026 belonged to voters. Again, the bank’s assuming the Fed’s lodestar remains policymaking in the public interest, which is to say policy informed mostly by the incoming data. So, a hawkish reaction function to match an employment-inflation conjuncture which finds headline CPI one uptick away from exceeding the jobless rate.

In a section called “What would stop the Fed from hiking?”, BofA stated the obvious. If job creation abruptly slows, or if core PCE manages “a few soft” prints, this Fed might eschew the hikes it wasn’t going to deliver anyway (see what I did there?).

Bhave mentioned two other factors that could stop the Fed from hiking. One of those factors is the stock market. “A major equity selloff could preclude hikes by slowing demand significantly, given K-shaped spending,” he said.

The other factor which might ultimately prevent higher rates is Warsh himself. “Perhaps,” Bhave mused, the new chair was “strategically hawkish” last week “to gain credibility” early in his tenure. Maybe, Bhave went on, Warsh is “just buying time until inflation falls or until his task forces make the case to stay on hold.”

That latter assessment’s almost surely the most accurate. And no, Aditya. No Fed chair of second-term Trump’s is going to deliver 75bps of rate hikes over just four meetings.