“Several” participants at last month’s FOMC meeting wanted to raise rates in light of what they judged to be “broad-based” inflation pressures. That’s according to the account of the July gathering released by the Fed on Wednesday afternoon in the US.

Of course, we already knew “several” policymakers favored a hike. “Several” means more than two and there were three hawkish dissents: Beth Hammack, Neel Kashkari and Lorie Logan. Since the meeting, Jeff Schmid and Alberto Musalem said they too would’ve supported a hike if they had a vote.

The minutes noted that “a few” of the participants who favored raising rates suggested doing so could help prevent a scenario where the FOMC was forced to play catch up later with a “steeper and potentially more costly sequence of tightening moves.”

Conceivably, “a few” out of “several” could still mean the number of policymakers who outwardly wanted to raise rates was confined to Hammack, Kashkari, Logan, Musalem and Schmid, but my guess is there were at least “a few” (to use the minutes’ parlance) other officials who could’ve supported a hike. Suffice to say Donald Trump’s man on the inside got the “good family fight” he asked for.

In describing Committee opinions on inflation, the minutes used “several” to describe the number of policymakers who were concerned that price increases aren’t confined to specific line items in the CPI and PCE releases, nor readily attributable to one-off factors. Those participants warned that inflation “span[s] various categories of goods and services.”

The account of the meeting said “some” participants fretted over elevated “supercore” prices (i.e., core services inflation excluding housing) and worried that “even after excluding prices of items most directly affected by tariffs and energy prices, underlying inflation appeared to be elevated.”

There was also “some” concern over the cost of AI-related goods and the materials needed to build data centers. Although “several” policymakers were relatively confident in assessing that those impacts are confined to “select categories,” “several other” participants cautioned that AI spending’s “already having broader effects on prices by pushing up aggregate demand.”

As far as Warsh’s implicit (sometimes it’s explicit) contention that the Committee can assume tomorrow’s disinflationary productivity gains while making policy for today, support among his colleagues seems tepid. While “some” meeting attendees said AI-related productivity gains will probably lower the cost of production and increase overall supply eventually, there was nothing like a consensus on how long that might take to pan out.

Needless to say, no one was especially enamored with the “recent re-escalation of the conflict in the Mideast,” and “many” policymakers said the protracted fighting “cloud[s] the outlook [and] could prolong supply chain challenges… put[ting] upward pressures on inflation.”

Although “most” participants expect inflation to soften over the balance of the year, “many participants highlighted the possibility that, after several years of [above-target] inflation,” the ongoing overshoot “could begin to affect wage- and price-setting decisions.”

Policymakers also reminded themselves that “successive supply shocks have repeatedly delayed the expected return of inflation to 2% in recent years, adding to concerns about persistently elevated inflation.” (“Yes, we know,” said “many” American families.)

Make of all that what you will. To be completely honest, the minutes didn’t come across as especially hawkish relative to what we already knew from the dissents, or at least not if you took 20 minutes to actually read the account of last month’s meeting. I might be the only person on Earth who did that on Wednesday.

As noted in this week’s macro preview, we’ve had a string of soft data since last month’s FOMC meeting. July’s disappointing jobs report, benign readouts on both CPI and PPI and a poor showing for the retail sales control group all suggest the hawks might’ve had it “wrong.” The odds of a hike in September are, in my view, vanishingly small.

Oh, and Warsh mentioned reducing the number of meetings the Fed holds each year. “The Chairman observed that six scheduled meetings per year, held roughly every two months, would allow more information to accumulate between meetings than under current practice and provide policymakers and the staff more time to consider strategic monetary policy issues,” the minutes said.

No decision was made as to whether the meeting schedule will in fact change in 2027.