A Divided Fed

Dissent at the Fed meeting: For the second time this year, the Federal Reserve Board cut interest rates by a quarter point—the lowest level in three years. “This remains a very divided Fed, as evidenced by the fact that two officials cast dissenting votes in opposite directions,” reports The New York Times. “One wanted a bigger, half-point cut; another wanted no cut at all. The split stems not only from divergent forecasts about the economy but also risk tolerances around allowing the labor market to weaken or inflation to stay elevated.”

This is consistent with the previous meetings: Back at July’s meeting, two board members disagreed with the final decision to hold rates steady. At September’s meeting, President Donald Trump appointee Stephen Miran—who had just been appointed—called for a half-point cut instead of a more cautious quarter-point cut (like the rest of the board agreed to). Then in this meeting, Miran said much the same, but was opposed by Jeffrey Schmid, who advocated no decrease at all.

“The decision to lower interest rates by 25bps in October was never in doubt, but the unexpected hawkish dissent from a regional Fed president highlights that future moves are becoming more contentious,” Michael Pearce, deputy chief U.S. economist at Oxford Economics, told CNBC. “We expect the Fed to slow the pace of cuts from here.”

“A further reduction in the policy rate at the December meeting is not a foregone conclusion—far from it,” said Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell in a post-meeting press conference.

Powell noted that, though the economy looks strong in the aggregate, things look rather bifurcated right now: Spending by high-income households is possibly obscuring some of the pain and pressure felt by low-income households. He signaled that poor Americans are feeling greater financial pressure than before, citing the growing number of defaults on subprime auto loans. (“The percentage of subprime borrowers—those with credit scores below 670—who are at least 60 days late on their car loans has doubled since 2021 to 6.43%, according to Fitch Ratings,” reports CNN.)

He also conveyed concerns about tariffs raising inflation (the effects of which still have not fully been felt, due to stockpiling by large retailers, which is due to run out soon) and a weakening labor market.

Ceasefire updates: In yesterday’s Roundup, I was insufficiently careful in my reporting of the Gazan death toll—the 100 allegedly killed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) is, after all, reported by the health ministry there, which is controlled by Hamas, so it is very hard to tell whether such numbers are reliable.

Since then, the death toll reported by the ministry of health has risen to 104, with 66 of those alleged to be women and children, and Israeli government sources say “dozens” of top Hamas commanders were taken out, naming 26 militants specifically.

It is very hard to tell whether the Gaza Ministry of Health numbers are accurate, and Hamas has repeatedly used human shields in an attempt to protect its combatants from Israeli strikes. Now, amid the renewed fighting, both sides are becoming further entrenched: Though Israel says it remains committed to maintaining (resuming?) the truce, Hamas has said, per Associated Press reporting, that “it would delay handing over the body of another hostage to Israel because of the strikes.” This most recent round of fighting was allegedly sparked by Hamas forces violating the U.S.-brokered ceasefire by attacking IDF soldiers, killing a reservist (Master Sgt. Yona Efraim Feldbaum) on Tuesday. The Qatari prime minister said, following this incident, that mediators are renewing their push to “get [Hamas] to a point where they acknowledge that they need to disarm.”

Trump, fresh off his victorious Knesset speech just two weeks ago, doesn’t seem all too concerned: “They killed an Israeli soldier. So the Israelis hit back. And they should hit back,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One yesterday. “Nothing is going to jeopardize” the ceasefire, he added, with characteristic overconfidence.

“We actually met with people [who] were leading [Hamas], and… I think they’re unhappy when they see some people being killed,” he added, rather confusingly (given that he’s referencing…a terrorist group).

“The ceasefire is holding. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t going to be little skirmishes here and there,” Vice President J.D. Vance told reporters.

Scenes from New York: 

People wearing “freeze the rent” pins while saying they want more housing built–why would any builder build apartments in a city prone to arbitrary rent freezes?–is yet another sign of America’s descent into Idiocracy. https://t.co/rttJvoEiv8

— David Bernstein (@ProfDBernstein) October 28, 2025

Related: “The socialist housing plan for New York City”

QUICK HITS

• “Transit is one of the very few things that makes New York affordable,” Metropolitan Transportation Authority head Janno Lieber tells a group of independent New York journalists, critiquing Zohran Mamdani’s free-buses plan. “It’s not an affordability problem, compared to the whole country, people spend a lot less on transportation as part of their budgets. It’s an affordability solution, but we want to make it more so. And the Fair Fares program has been successful with targeting affordability. But what’s good about Fair Fares is you can use that discount if you’re low-income for the subway or the bus. So one of the first things I want to get into is, why would we say the bus is free, but [not] the subway—what does that mean? Are people going to ride the bus instead of the subway?…Why is the bus the whole focus? Let’s talk about how to make transit—it’s affordable, it’s a good thing it is, but let’s talk about how to make it more affordable. And we do have tools like the Fair Fares program, where we could raise the eligibility threshold.” (Also, interestingly, future bus revenues are pledged to the bondholders who finance the whole Metropolitan Transportation Authority system; bondholder approval—which they’re not going to give—would be necessary before changing the bus fares in the manner Mamdani proposes.)
• Things appear to be heating up near Venezuela:

#Venezuela: B52s within 70 miles of Caracas, B1s within 50 miles before and 20 miles off the coast this week. Aircraft have likely mapped air defenses. Now the Ford Carrier Strike Group and escorts.

We’ve crossed a rubicon. Something big against the @NicolasMaduro regime coming. https://t.co/8oW7AMx4k1

— Ryan Berg, PhD (@RyanBergPhD) October 29, 2025

• A predictable consequence of ratcheting up tariffs: Canada is now shoring up trade ties with Asia. Bloomberg has more.
• This strikes me as such a misleading headline from Politico, designed to elicit rage: “RFK Jr.’s top vaccine adviser says he answers to no one.” But the actual interview, which is with Martin Kulldorff (former Just Asking Questions guest), is full of very wise chunks, in which Kulldorff talks about how the health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has asked him to try to just…impartially follow the science and sift through the available evidence, how Kulldorff is attempting to maintain a posture of humility regarding what we know and what we don’t (including on topics like adverse vaccine reactions), and how he thinks COVID-19 vaccine mandates really damaged public trust in the health authorities.
• “In long-awaited cuts just months after completing its $8 billion merger with Skydance, Paramount has begun layoffs set to impact about 2,000 employees,” reports the Associated Press. This amounts to about 10 percent of Paramount’s workforce. Roughly half of those will be carried out immediately, while the rest will be done more steadily over the coming weeks and months. More here:

One CBS News staffer described the cuts as a “blood bath.”

I’ve also heard that the Race and Culture unit was “gutted.” https://t.co/P3tPH618OL

— Jeremy Barr (@jeremymbarr) October 29, 2025

• More of a conservative take than an explicitly libertarian one, but there’s certainly something interesting in here about changing norms and the declining stigma of welfare, which is probably a bad social indicator:

Posted before but… A friend of mine once made a very good observation about “a great little throwaway scene in Cinderella Man where Jimmy Braddock goes to the public assistance office because his kids are freezing to death and the woman who *works at the public assistance… https://t.co/mrDQJqROy9

— Mark Hemingway (@Heminator) October 29, 2025

a lot of people, left and right, don’t get that voting hard left is as much a class signifier as where you went to school or skiing in the alps https://t.co/2f38XqmTeK

— Melian Refugee (@escapefrommelos) October 29, 2025