The Federal Open Market Committee published the minutes of its September 15-16 meeting on Wednesday afternoon. The document runs fifteen pages. The committee voted 12-0 at that meeting to raise the federal funds rate from 3.5%-3.75% to 3.75%-4%, the first rate increase in three years, and the dot plot released alongside the decision showed sixteen of eighteen members expected at least one more hike before the year ends. The minutes provide the detailed record of how the committee reasoned its way to that position.
The problem is that the reasoning was built on data that no longer describes the present.
On October 2, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released the September jobs report. The economy added 29,000 jobs in September, far below the 90,000 economists had projected, and the weakest monthly total since July. Futures market probability tools that track expectations for the next FOMC meeting, which is scheduled for October 27-28, had implied roughly a 70% chance of another quarter-point increase before the jobs report. After it, those odds fell to approximately 20%. The committee that voted unanimously three weeks ago hasn’t met since. The minutes explain the committee’s September thinking. What they don’t explain is what sixteen of eighteen members will conclude about October now that the September labor data is on the table. BabyPips reported on the rate-hold expectations shift after the minutes release Wednesday.
The Fed has been in situations like this before. In the fall of 1994, the committee had raised rates six times in nine months, from 3% in February to 5.5% by November, in an effort to stay ahead of inflation that Alan Greenspan believed was coming. Greenspan was right about the inflation, eventually. But the pace of the hike cycle rattled bond markets globally and contributed to the Mexican peso crisis of early 1995. By July 1995, the Fed had cut rates once. The lesson the committee drew from that episode was about the difference between a rate cycle that is clearly underway and one whose continuation depends on data that hasn’t arrived yet. The September 2026 dot plot suggests a committee that believed continuation was warranted. The September jobs report suggests the data may not cooperate.
Hurricane Isaias is moving northeast across the Gulf of Mexico Thursday and is expected to strengthen before reaching the northern Gulf Coast. The National Hurricane Center’s Thursday morning track puts landfall sometime Friday night through Saturday, with the storm’s path running from southeastern Louisiana toward the Florida Panhandle. Forecasters are projecting Isaias could reach Category 2 strength before landfall, with sustained winds in the range of 96 to 110 miles per hour. Emergency declarations are in effect across the coastline from eastern Louisiana through Alabama and the Florida Panhandle. Forecasters are warning of three to six inches of rainfall across the impact zone, with some locations potentially receiving up to ten inches, coastal storm surge along exposed shorelines, and isolated tornadoes ahead of the storm’s main circulation. The National Shrimp Festival in Gulf Shores, Alabama, which draws nearly 250,000 visitors in early October each year, has been called off. Newsweek is tracking the storm’s path and forecast models Thursday morning.
What was Tropical Depression 9 on Wednesday morning, forecast to become the Atlantic season’s first named hurricane, has now officially been named. The Gulf has remained warm enough this fall to support development at a time of year when most Atlantic seasons have already peaked. Communities along the projected track have until late Friday to complete storm preparations. The Gulf Coast has several hours remaining before conditions deteriorate offshore.
The Department of Justice filed a court-ordered status report on Wednesday in the Louisiana federal case challenging the Food and Drug Administration’s 2023 decision to allow mifepristone to be dispensed by mail and at pharmacies following a telehealth appointment, rather than requiring in-person pickup. The brief told the court that the FDA’s internal safety review of mifepristone is still in progress and will not be completed this year. The FDA had estimated when it officially announced the review in September 2025 that the process would take less than a year. That estimated deadline has now passed. KFF has been tracking the case and the review timeline.
The FDA approved mifepristone in 2000. It is currently used in more than 60% of abortions in the United States. The Louisiana case challenges the 2023 regulatory expansion, not the drug’s original approval. In April 2026, the court paused further litigation for six months to allow the FDA review to proceed and provide the factual record the case turns on. With the review now running past its estimated end date, the pause continues and the 2023 access rules remain in effect while the agency works. The court denied an earlier motion by Louisiana seeking a preliminary injunction that would have barred telehealth prescribing and mail dispensing nationwide while the case proceeded. The legal posture on Thursday is the same as it was Wednesday: the court is waiting, the review is running, and the drug is available.
Four Indonesian crew members from the oil tanker MT Honour 25 arrived home at Soekarno-Hatta International Airport on Tuesday, where Indonesia’s Foreign Minister Arrmanatha Nasir met them on the tarmac. The men were among twelve surviving crew members rescued on September 29 by maritime police from Puntland, the semi-autonomous region of northeastern Somalia, after the vessel had been held by pirates for more than five months. The South China Morning Post reported the homecoming Tuesday.
The MT Honour 25, a Palau-flagged vessel carrying approximately 18,500 barrels of oil, was seized in the Gulf of Aden on April 21. The crew of seventeen came from Indonesia, Pakistan, India, and Myanmar. Before Puntland maritime police stormed the vessel on September 29 and captured sixteen suspected pirates, the pirates killed five crew members: three from Pakistan, one from India, one from Myanmar. Four additional crew members from Pakistan were injured and returned to Karachi last week with the remains of their three colleagues. The Tuesday arrivals in Jakarta were the last of the surviving crew to make the journey home.
Somali piracy peaked between 2008 and 2012, when hijackings and ransom demands disrupted commercial shipping throughout one of the world’s busiest corridors, the Gulf of Aden and the western Indian Ocean. International naval patrols, industry adoption of armed private security aboard commercial vessels, and increased capacity in Somali coastal governance drove incident rates steeply lower through the mid-2010s. The death toll aboard the Honour 25 is the first confirmed killing of mariners by Somali pirates in more than a decade. It’s a reminder that what reduced piracy wasn’t the elimination of the conditions that created it. It was a shift in the economics and deterrence structure around it. Those conditions are still there.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced on Wednesday that the 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry goes to Henri B. Kagan of France and Kenso Soai of Japan, awarded “for the discovery of non-linear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis.” The prize addresses a problem at the center of organic chemistry that also touches one of the more fundamental questions in biology: why life, which could in principle be built from either mirror image of most molecules, is built almost exclusively from one. CNN covered the announcement Wednesday morning.
The technical name for the mirror-image property of molecules is chirality. Most of the molecules that matter in biology, amino acids, sugars, proteins, can be assembled as either a left-handed or right-handed version. Both versions are chemically identical by composition. The two versions interact with other molecules differently. A drug built from the wrong-handed version can be inert at best. At worst, it can be harmful. The thalidomide disaster of the early 1960s, when a drug prescribed to pregnant women for morning sickness caused severe birth defects in thousands of children, resulted in part from a failure to account for chirality. The drug’s harmful effects came from one mirror image. The disaster accelerated interest in how to control which version of a molecule a reaction produces.
Kagan’s contribution, developed in the 1980s, was showing that a small initial imbalance of one mirror image could be amplified nonlinearly through the right kind of catalytic reaction, producing a far greater excess than prior chemistry suggested was possible. Soai built further: in 1995, he published a key description of a chemical reaction in which the product acts as its own catalyst. In that reaction, the molecule that forms accelerates the formation of more of itself, and only of its own mirror image. By 2003, he had demonstrated the reaction producing a single mirror image with near-perfect selectivity. Both men have been working in this field for decades. The recognition took as long as it did because the Nobel committee waits. It watches whether a discovery survives replication, whether it propagates into the work of others, whether the field it opened turns out to have been real. The chemistry born from their work is embedded in the synthesis of modern pharmaceuticals, in the manufacture of drugs that work precisely because they arrive in the correct-handed form. The field that opened was real.
Howard Fenn writes The Day, Monday through Saturday.
