Three Fed Officials Voted to Raise Rates. Nobody Is Pricing That In.

The Federal Reserve has not moved the federal funds rate since 11 December 2025. Eight months, five meetings, one number: 3.50 to 3.75 percent.

That reads like nothing happening. Underneath it, at the July meeting, the vote was 9 to 3 — and all three dissenters wanted to go the other way. Beth Hammack, Neel Kashkari and Lorie Logan voted for an increase.

Almost every conversation about rates right now assumes the only live question is when the cutting resumes. Three members of the committee that sets the rate spent July arguing the next move should be up. That is the thing to carry into 16 September, which is a projections meeting, which means the disagreement stops being a vote count and starts being a chart.

What a 9–3 actually tells you¶

Dissents at the FOMC are not rare, but their direction is informative, and three of them pointing the same way is a signal about the committee's centre of gravity rather than about three individuals.

The ordinary shape of a dissent over the past two years has been a member wanting to ease faster. July inverted it. The statement's own reasoning explains why: inflation is still running above the two percent objective, some of it driven by supply-side pressure in energy rather than by demand, while the labour market has stayed roughly in balance — job creation broadly matching workforce growth, unemployment moving very little.

That combination is the uncomfortable one for a central bank. Weak labour plus high inflation gives you a hard trade-off but a clear conversation. Stable labour plus sticky above-target inflation gives you three people asking why you are still holding a rate you cut three times in late 2025.

Why 16 September is the meeting¶

The Fed publishes a Summary of Economic Projections at four of its eight meetings a year. September is one of them.

The SEP contains the dot plot: each participant's view of where the appropriate policy rate should be at the end of this year and the next few. It is the only regular publication that turns the committee's internal disagreement into something you can look at.

1. 1

   The vote tells you what happened

   9–3, with the three wanting more. A snapshot of one decision.

2. 2

   The dot plot tells you what they think happens next

   Whether the three hawkish dissents are outliers or the leading edge of a shifted median. Same information, forward-looking.

3. 3

   The gap between them is where your planning risk lives

   A held rate with a stable dot plot is a quiet year. A held rate with a dot plot that has drifted up is a warning that the cuts you budgeted are not coming.

The remaining 2026 calendar after September is 27–28 October and 8–9 December. If you are modelling anything rate-sensitive into next year, those are the only two other chances for the number to move.

How this reaches an actual small business¶

The federal funds rate is not your borrowing rate. It is an overnight rate between banks, and no small firm borrows at it.

The connection most operators actually feel runs through the prime rate. By long-standing convention rather than by law, banks set prime at the upper bound of the fed funds target plus three percentage points. With the upper bound at 3.75%, that puts prime at 6.75%.

That matters because a large share of small-business credit is quoted as prime plus a spread:

Two consequences worth being precise about.

A variable line reprices on its own. If your line of credit is prime-linked, a Fed move changes your interest cost without any letter, conversation or decision on your part. That is true in both directions, which is why the two-sided risk in the July vote is not an abstraction.

Your spread is not the Fed's doing. If your rate went up while prime sat still, that is your bank repricing your risk, your sector, or your relationship — and that is a conversation you can actually have. Confusing the two is how owners end up angry at the wrong institution, and the failure statistics are full of firms that never had it.

The honest read¶

Eight months of holding is not the Fed being idle. It is the Fed sitting still while its own committee argues, and the July vote is the first hard evidence in a while of which direction that argument now runs.

For planning purposes the useful posture is neither "cuts are coming" nor "hikes are coming". It is that the next move is genuinely uncertain in direction, which is a different and more expensive assumption than the one most 2026 budgets were built on.

It's just business¶

The rate has not moved since December. The story is not the stillness; it is that three people on the committee spent July voting to break it in the direction almost nobody is planning for.

You cannot do anything about the decision. You can do something about the assumption. If your forecast still has cuts in it, take them out, run the year at 6.75% prime, and find out now whether the plan survives — rather than on 16 September, or in the eleven months after it. The same discipline that makes tracking your actual numbers a twenty-minute weekly job is what turns a rate decision from an event into a line item, and it is the same reason absorbing costs without measuring them is how a good year quietly becomes a thin one.